Airfoil Aeroelasticity

Aeroelasticity is the relationship between a structure’s elastic response to the fluid flowing over it. Aircraft structures must be strong and lightweight. Sometime the tradeoff results in structures that exhibit a strong coupling between their elastic and fluid responses. At high aircraft speeds, such an aeroealstic response may have a negative effect on the structures’ intended aerodynamic, structural, and stability parameters. The goal of this research is to find if unfavorable aeroelastic responses can be reduced with changes in geometry of the aircraft. Continuum Sensitivity Analysis is used to obtain the derivatives or aeroelastic response of a flexible airfoil with respect to the geometry parameters of the airfoil. SU2, a fluid solver, finds the pressure on an airfoil by modeling the airfoil and a large surrounding area as a mesh. Hundreds of sub-iterations are required to converge to an accurate value for pressure and lift. Then, NASTRAN software finds the deformation or elastic response of the structure due to the pressure applied to it from the flow solver. This process of running SU2 and then NASTRAN must be iterated until static equilibrium is reached, eventually converging to a shape that represents the airfoil\u27s deformation due to pressure from the airflow