Aeroelastic reduced-order modeling for efficient static aeroelastic analysis considering geometric nonlinearity

The computational fluid dynamic/computational structural dynamic (CFD/CSD) coupling method plays an important role in static aeroelastic problems accounting for structural geometric nonlinearity. However, a huge computational burden comes from the CFD simulation, which also dominates the computational cost of the CFD/CSD coupling method. Therefore, this paper presents a reduced-order framework for steady aerodynamics to replace the CFD simulation, which is then coupled with the CSD solver for efficient static aeroelastic analysis considering geometric nonlinearity. Results first show that the proposed approach is capable of accurately predicting the surface pressure distribution of a high-aspect-ratio wing in its rigid undeformed shape at different Mach numbers and angles of attack, with at most a 2.5% relative error compared to CFD simulation. In addition, the geometrically nonlinear structure, a seminal benchmark without a tip slender body, is simulated by a three-dimensional open-source finite element solver coupled with either the CFD solver or the proposed reduced-order models (ROMs). The results demonstrate that the proposed ROM/CSD coupling approach can reflect the deformation and surface pressure distribution at static aeroelastic equilibrium with high accuracy and efficiency, thereby reducing the total computational cost at least five times while maintaining reasonable accuracy.