Efficient and accurate aeroelastic analyses based on small-disturbance cfd in early aircraft development

This paper presents several methods which are useful to reduce the number of small-disturbance CFD computations needed for the production of more accurate datasets for aeroelastic analyses in early aircraft development. The first method presented here is an AIC-correction technique using the results of a few small-disturbance CFD computations in order to generate downwash correction matrices for panel methods such as Doublet-Lattice or ZONA51 in MSC-NASTRAN [5]. The other two methods are based on a component-wise modal basis-technique similar to branch-mode techniques [3] and on the reuse of the modal basis of a given mass-state of an aircraft for dynamic and aeroelastic analyses at other mass states. All these methods are proven to be efficient, accurate and robust, and the authors show the potential reduction of the computational effort for concrete analysis cases by means of a generic MALE-configuration: OptiMALE.