Model reduction for gust load analysis of free-flying aircraft

The coupling of computational fluid dynamics and rigid body dynamics promises enhanced multidisciplinary simulation capability for aircraft design and certification. Industrial application of such coupled simulations is limited however by computational cost. In this context, model reduction can retain the fidelity of the underlying model while decreasing the computational effort. A model reduction technique is presented herein based on modal decomposition and projection of the non-linear residual function. Flight dynamics eigenmodes are obtained with an operator-based identification procedure which is capable of calculating these global modes of the coupled Jacobian matrix also for an industrial use case with nearly 50 million degrees-of-freedom. Additional modes based on proper orthogonal decomposition to describe the aerodynamic response due to gust encounter are combined with the eigenmode basis. Results are presented for initial disturbance analysis using flight dynamics modes only and for gust encounter simulations using the combined modal basis. Overall, the reduced model is capable of predicting the full order results accurately