Aeroelastic Analysis of Transonic Flutter with CFD-Based Reduced-Order Model

TL;DR

This paper develops a CFD-based reduced-order modeling approach for transonic flutter analysis, enabling efficient stability predictions by approximating unsteady aerodynamic forces with rational transfer functions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method combining CFD, system identification, and polynomial interpolation to accurately model transonic aeroelastic stability with minimal CFD runs.

Findings

Method accurately reproduces literature data

Single CFD run suffices for analysis

Effective in transonic flutter prediction

Abstract

The current work is concerned with studying processes for constructing reduced-order models capable of performing transonic aeroelastic stability analyses in the frequency domain based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. The CFD calculations are based on the Euler equations, and the code uses a finite volume formulation for general unstructured grids. A centered spatial discretization with added artificial dissipation is used, and an explicit Runge-Kutta time marching method is employed. The dynamic system considered in the present work is a NACA 0012 airfoil-based typical section in the transonic regime. Unsteady calculations are performed for mode-by-mode and simultaneous excitation approaches, the latter defined by orthogonal Walsh functions. System identification techniques are employed to allow the splitting of the aerodynamic coefficient time histories into the contribution of each individual mode to the corresponding aerodynamic transfer functions. Generalized unsteady aerodynamic forces are approximated by a rational transfer function in the Laplace domain, in which nonlinear parameters are selected through a non-gradient optimization process. Different types of interpolating polynomials are tested and the results are compared. Results show that the proposed procedure can reproduce literature aeroelastic analysis data with a single unsteady CFD run.