Cyrille Vidy, Lukas Katzenmeier, Maximilian Winter, Christian Breitsamter
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: IFASD-2015-066
In the last years, a lot of effort has been invested in the integration of smalldisturbance CFD aerodynamics in the classic aeroelastic analysis processes of Airbus Defence & Space. It is namely expected that the use of small-disturbance CFD could significantly increase the accuracy of the aeroelastic predictions, especially for more complex configurations, taking some advantage of the linearization in order to limit the increase of the computational costs. A strong partnership with the Technische Universität München has already allowed to assess the performance and the quality of the small-disturbance CFD aerodynamics for different configurations for flutter. However, the gust analysis had only been tested in the case of a two-dimensional wing profile. In this paper, the authors want to present the results of a complete dynamic aeroelastic analysis of two different configurations, including flutter aspects, discrete gust analyses and continuous turbulence results for each configuration, in order to verify as well the quality as the performance of small-disturbance CFD aerodynamics for linear aeroelastic analyses. The first configuration is the well-known AGARD wing 445.6 (weakened 3), the second one is a generic medium altitude-long endurance (MALE) configuration with high aspect ratio wing, underwing tanks, engines and T-tail. As a reference, Doublet-Lattice results will be also presented in this paper for both configurations. A further aspect that will be developed in this paper is the simplicity and the robustness of the integration of the small-disturbance aerodynamics in the form of generalized aerodynamics forces in the linear aeroelastic process. This point is one of the biggest advantages of this method, because small-disturbance CFD aeroelastic analyses can be defined exactly in the same way as in the case of the potential theory, thus not needing any interpretation of or any change in the actual civil and military certification requirements. To summarize, it is now possible by Airbus Defence and Space to use as well classical potential theory as small-disturbance CFD aerodynamics for any of the dynamic aeroelastic analyses that can be necessary for the development and the certification of an airplane, profiting from the speed of Doublet-Lattice and of the precision’s improvement due to smalldisturbance CFD.