Systems Identification Approach for a Computational-Fluid-Dynamics-Based Aeroelastic Analysis

This paper presents a novel state-space model-based systems identification method for accurate and efficient simulation of the aeroelastic phenomenon of flight vehicles, among others. Both structural and fluid discretization are achieved by the common finite element method, their interactions being modeled by the transpiration boundary condition technique. The computational fluid dynamics analysis is valid for either inviscid or viscous flow, and structural deformation is assumed to be small in nature. A number of example problems are solved by the systems identification procedure, developed herein, and such results are compared with that obtained by the direct time-marched analysis method reported earlier. The examples include a cantilever wing with a NACA 0012 airfoil, the Hyper X launch vehicle, and the F/A-18 AAW aircraft. These analysis results show a considerable improvement in central processing unit solution time for the new systems identification procedure over the usual time-marched solution.