Continuous Dynamic Simulation of Nonlinear Aerodynamics/Nonlinear Structure Interaction (NANSI) for Morphing Vehicles

ZONA Team proposes in Phase II to develop a general nonlinear methodology with a new and expedient reduced-order-modeling-based procedure as well as direct numerical simulation capability for nonlinear aeroelastic design/analysis of air-vehicles and MAVs under continuous dynamic morphing The proposed methodology, called NANSI.AE, has significant novelty and merits in that it integrates multidisciplinary domains including nonlinear structures, computational aerodynamics, ROM methodology for wings in morphing with large amplitude motions. The promising outcome of Phase I will lead to the success of the proposed Phase II program. Thus, the multi-body-dynamics wing modeling will be extended to include distributed and local nonlinearities for morphing wings subject to structural uncertainty. The gridless-boundary-condition-Cartesian grid (GBCC3D) method will be further developed to include a viscous option and the separated-flow option adopting the vortex confinement method. A generalized ROM-ROM procedure will be developed to combine the nonlinear structural morphing ROM (extended ELSTEP) with the nonlinear aerodynamic ROM (using nonlinear system identification) to solve for nonlinear aeroelastic responses under continuous wing morphing. Finally, NANSI.AE along with each sub-domain solvers will be validated on a folding wing and MAV wings with available solutions and measured data. ZONA plans to work closely with AFRL in Phase II.