Multibody simulation of an oscillating aeroelastic wing model

Abstract

The central challenge is to simulate the time-accurate aeroelastic coupling of the flexible wing model of a transport aircraft with a non-linear aerodynamic solver in forced oscillations of large amplitude which are superimposed by rigid body motions. The rigid motions introduce flight mechanical aspects to the aeroelastic simulation.

The simulation platform described in this work is one of two investigated variants in the DLR project SikMa and is charcterized by the use of a multibody system (MBS) to account for the elastic structure as well as the flight mechanics and its loose coupling to the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The exchanged data is interpolated with a commercial mesh coupling tool and transferred through an internet socket allowing a distributed computational environment.

Simulations for the wind tunnel setup of the wing model cover the prediction of the aeroelastic state of equilibrium and forced oscillations for heave and pitch excitations. In the case of equilibrium, the simulation results are partially compared to wind tunnel data.