A multi-time scale solution strategy for an elastomeric aircraft

Abstract This paper develops a multi-time scale kinetics solution strategy for the flight dynamic simulation of elastomeric aircraft. The combination of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver and reduced-order model is utilized to calculate the aerodynamics of elastic aircraft. CFD is applied to the aerodynamic solution of rigid motion, and reduced-order model is to the elastic deformation. The governing equations of rigid-body dynamics and structure dynamics are decoupled in time-scale, and their time step sizes can be set differently. This method overcomes the problem of large difference in characteristic times between rigid-body dynamics and structure dynamics, and improves the calculation efficiency of CFD based multi-disciplinary coupling solution. For current work, the multi-time scale kinetics solution method is applied to the simulation of store separation problem considering elastic deformation of carrier aircraft. The autoregressive with exogenous input model is employed to establish the generalized aerodynamic model of carrier. By comparison, the time responses of store obtained by the multi-time scale kinetics solution method are in good agreement with those by traditional CFD based multi-disciplinary coupling simulation, which validates high precision of the new method. Furthermore, the calculation amount of the new coupled calculation method is reduced by about an order of magnitude compared with that of the traditional method. The multi-time scale kinetics solution method can provide an effective solution strategy for similar engineering problems.