Panel Response Prediction Through Reduced Order Models with Application to Hypersonic Aircraft

Abstract

The present work is the culmination of a series of investigations by the authors on the construction and validation of structural, thermal, and coupled structural-thermal reduced order models (ROMs) for the prediction of the displacements and temperature fields on a representative panel of a hypersonic aircraft during a particular trajectory. The focus of the present paper is first on the development and validation of an efficient strategy for enriching the thermal ROM basis to reflect the temperature distribution induced by the structural deformations through changes of the aerodynamics. Next, the assembly of the thermal and structural ROM bases and the identification of their coefficients is revisited for both cases of constant and temperature dependent coefficient of thermal expansion. The coupled ROM predictions are finally compared to those obtained from full structural and thermal finite element models and it is seen that the ROMs perform overall very well over the large temperature change during the trajectory, from room temperature to 2300F. The only exception to the accuracy of the ROMs is a mode switching event occurring for one of the finite element models but not for the ROMs. This issue is under continued investigation.

An Experimental Characterization of the Impedance and Spectral Content of Multistable Structural Responses During Dynamic Bifurcations

“…Thus, the accurate prediction of snap-through dynamics is critical to the operation of future high-performance air vehicles. To this end, Culler and McNamara [10,11] and Matney et al [12] have made advancements toward a simulation-based framework by which the complex multiphysics interactions may be investigated. Yet, the large computational costs incurred by numerical methods have encouraged researchers to probe the dynamics of lightly buckled bistable beams and postbuckled oscillators because the low-dimensional dynamic systems are favorable to obtain underlying insights associated with bifurcations and snap-through response through analytical methods.…”

Analytical Modeling and Impedance Characterization of the Nonlinear Dynamics of Thermomechanically Coupled Structures

“…Finite element methods have been formulated by Daneshjo and Ramezani [13] and Carrera et al [14] to study the linear dynamics of laminate plates exhibiting rich coupling between thermal and mechanical domains. Reduced-order models have been shown by Matney et al [15], Perez et al [16], and Settimi et al [17] to characterize the intricate thermal and mechanical coupling while requiring less computational expense than numerical integration of a finite element model. Yet, the ability to obtain fundamental insight into thermal-structural interactions via parametric studies may be limited by the case study-dependent nature and computational costs of numerical methods.…”