Physics-Based Aeroelastic Analysis for Future Air Vehicle Concepts Using a Fully Nonlinear Methodology

Future air vehicles will be highly flexible and will include deformable sub-systems resulting in new physical interactions between a vehicles structure, the surrounding flowfleld, and the dynamics of the vehicle that are fundamentally nonlinear. Although existing aeroelastic methodologies might be considered reliable for traditional applications, they fail as evidenced by current experiences to properly capture the complex physics expected for these vehicles. Challenges include non-traditional and time-varying geometries, separated flows, nonlinear dynamic vehicle states, and high-fidelity modeling requirements for highly integrated vehicles. In short, there are no means for understanding the basic interactions that occur in systems dominated by nonlinearities in all three disciplines -structure, flow, and dynamics, nor are the computational interfaces adequate to handle the nonlinear interdisciplinary interactions.