Uncoupled method for static aeroelastic analysis

Abstract Fluid–structure interaction (FSI) analysis is often highly computationally expensive, making it infeasible to conduct iterative aeroelastic design studies or rigorous optimizations. This work develops a new method for aeroelastic analysis that can be more efficient in the determination of final structure/fluid equilibrium configurations, especially during design studies where attributes of a structure may be altered but those of the flow are unchanged. In this new scheme, referred to as the uncoupled static aeroelastic analysis method, the usual approach of performing fluid and structure analysis that increments in time in a coupled manner is replaced by many fully decoupled, and thus highly parallelizable, structural and fluid analyses. Surrogate modeling of results enables analytical determination of interpolation intersections between physical solution fields, such intersections being proposed as the solution to coupled FSI analysis. Since the fluid and structure result sets are calculated and stored separately, fluid results can be re-used without additional analysis when the structure considered is modified (e.g., as during a design study), enabling new solutions to be quickly obtained while avoiding the more expensive fluid evaluations. This new method is demonstrated herein on three examples: (1) a rigid baffle, (2) a cantilevered deformable baffle, and (3) an aeroelastic wing. For each, the solution found via the uncoupled method is shown to closely approximate the FSI solution. Parallelization of the evaluations required to generate data for the uncoupled method enables solutions to be obtained in significantly less time as compared to the coupled scheme.