Unsteady aerodynamic validation experiences from the Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop

Abstract

The AIAA Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop (AePW) was held in April 2012, bringing together communities of aeroelasticians, computational fluid dynamicists and experimentalists. The extended objective was to assess the state of the art in computational aeroelastic methods as practical tools for the prediction of static and dynamic aeroelastic phenomena. As a step in this process, workshop participants analyzed unsteady aerodynamic and weakly-coupled aeroelastic cases. Forced oscillation and unforced system experiments and computations have been compared for three configurations. This paper emphasizes interpretation of the experimental data, computational results and their comparisons from the perspective of validation of unsteady system predictions. The issues examined in detail are variability introduced by input choices for the computations, post-processing, and static aeroelastic modeling. The final issue addressed is interpreting unsteady information that is present in experimental data that is assumed to be steady, and the resulting consequences on the comparison data sets. Nomenclature C M Pitching moment coefficient C p Coefficient of pressure f Frequency, Hz M Mach number x/c Normalized chord location, chordwise coordinate/local chord length y + Dimensionless, sublayer-scaled wall coordinate of first node away from surface α Angle of attack η Normalized span location, spanwise coordinate/semi-span AePW

Aero-Propulso-Elastic Analysis of a Supersonic Transport

“…This iterative process of updating the mesh deformation and fluid solution is repeated for every time step to obtain the time history of the modal displacements, velocities, and forces. This formulation is well-established in several notable studies and benchmark test cases [45][46][47][48].…”