Simultaneous Excitation of Multiple-Input/Multiple-Output CFD-Based Unsteady Aerodynamic Systems

A significant improvement to the development of computational-fluid-dynamics-based unsteady aerodynamic reduced-order models is presented. The improvement involves the simultaneous excitation of the structural modes of the computational-fluid-dynamics-based unsteady aerodynamic system. This improvement enables the computation of the unsteady aerodynamic state-space model using a single computational fluid dynamics execution, independent of the number of structural modes. Two new types of input functions are presented that can be used for the simultaneous excitation of the unsteady aerodynamic system via the excitation of the structural modes. Results are presented for a semispan configuration using the CFL3Dv6.4 code.