A FORMULATION FOR WING AEROELASTIC ANALYSIS BASED ON THE UNSTEADY VLM AND STRUCTURAL DISCONTINUOUS GALERKIN TECHNIQUE

Abstract

This work proposes the conjoined use of the aerodynamic unsteady vortex lattice method (UVLM) and the structural discontinuous Garlerkin (DG) method for the general aeroelastic analysis of aircraft wings. While DG methods have been profitably employed for the analysis of solid and fluid mechanics, the coupling between DG methods and UVLM constitutes the novelty of the proposed study, which grants several advantages over more established approaches. The proposed DG structural formulation offers seamless higher order accuracy and straightforward coupling with the aerodynamic UVLM, which is implemented both in the planar and nonplanar versions. In particular, different orders of accuracy can be easily selected in the structural model, both throughout the transverse section and along the span of the wing, thus offering the opportunity of tailoring the order of approximation to the features of the considered aeroelastic component. The obtained results agree well with available literature data and confirm the potential of the DG-UVLM framework for early aircraft conceptual analysis.