Static Aeroelastic Simulation of a Wing in Transonic Flow

ARTICLE INFORMATION ABSTRACT Original Research Paper Received 24 July 2016 Accepted 08 September 2016 Available Online 15 October 2016 Precise modeling has great importance in systems which are designed to work in transonic regions. The scope of current investigation includes numerical simulation of static aeroelastic phenomena of deformable structures in transonic regimes. Transonic flow brings lots of instabilities for aerodynamic systems. These instabilities bring nonlinearity in flow and structure solvers. Due to improvements in numerical methods and also enhancement in computing technologies, computational costs are reduced and high-fidelity simulations are more applicable. Simulations in this paper are done in transonic flow (M = 0.96) on the benchmark wing AGARD 445.6. The procedure includes modal analysis, steady flow simulation and investigation of structure’s elastic behavior. At the first phase, the geometry model is validated by modal analysis with regard to comparison of first four natural frequencies and corresponding mode shapes. Then, a loose or staggered coupling is used to analyze aeroelastic behavior of the wing. In each simulation step, imposed pressure on the surfaces of the wing caused by transonic flow regime deforms the structure. In the results section, a comparison between imposed pressure coefficients in each step with the existing literature and experimental results is reported. Also, pressure coefficients in each step is calculated and reported. In this investigation by using multiple steps in oneway fluid-structure analysis, deformations are reduced in each step and, as a result, the structure reached its static stability point.