Reduced Order Modelling of Aircraft Gust Response for Use in Early Design Stages

Abstract

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms This paper expands on the work previous carried out by authors in exploring the role Reduced Order Models (ROMs) can play in the early stages of the aircraft design cycle, particularly in respect of modelling the response to atmospheric gusts. Gusts have a large impact on the development of aircraft due to their prevalence among the critical design cases for loads. Despite this, the traditional methods of modelling such cases are restricted due to high costs associated with both wind tunnel testing and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. This is particularly problematic and restrictive during those early design stages where designs may change significantly and frequently. ROMs have been shown to be capable of reproducing gust responses at lower costs compared to the high fidelity simulations, and previous work presented by the authors introduced a number of techniques that could be used to make the process of gust ROM creation more efficient without loss of accuracy. This paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in more detail and introduces further new techniques to improve efficiency. In particular this paper will consider more complex test cases which better reflect the industrial demands upon such a tool which is likely to be used in the design of aircraft.

Preliminary aeroelastic design of composite wings subjected to critical gust loads

“…The goal of the MOR techniques is to produce a system that shows similar aeroelastic response characteristics as the original, but consists of significantly fewer state variables, leading to a reduction in computational cost. Majority of the work done [11][12][13][14][15] was focused on using MOR techniques to reduce the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to predict the gust response. In the early stages of the design process, there is a need to evaluate a multitude of designs.…”