Investigation of Transonic Aeroelasticity of Aircraft

Abstract

Lifting bodies, such as wings, blades, and hydrofoils, may be subject to instabilities, such as divergence, flutter, and resonance, which can stress the structure and reduce its service life. Therefore, it is important to understand and accurately predict the response and stability of such structures to ensure their structural safety and facilitate the design. The present work numerically approach to determine flutter characteristics of the NACA0012 wing through a steady state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation which provides the fluid pressure on the wing surfaces. This is then applied as a boundary condition for the finite element simulation of the configuration. Such an approach is called one-way coupled simulation since no deformation feedback to CFD. To catch the influence of the deformed wing on the aerodynamic performance, the deformation has to be brought back into the CFD solution such that an improved solution can be found and the loop can be closed. This comprises what is called two-way coupled fluid structure interaction (FSI) simulation or multiphasic simulation, which is investigated in this thesis. This work presents a three-dimensional numerical fluid-structure interaction (FSI) modeling of a vibrating wing using the commercial software ANSYS-FLUENT and investigates the aerodynamic damping as the fluid contribution to the total damping of wing flutter.