An efficient evaluation method for wing fuel mass variations effect on transonic aeroelasticity
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
ISSN: 0002-2667
Article publication date: 1 February 2022
Issue publication date: 26 April 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to develop an efficient evaluation method to more intuitively and effectively investigate the influence of the wing fuel mass variations because of fuel burn on transonic aeroelasticity.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed efficient aeroelastic evaluation method is developed by extending the standard computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based proper orthogonal decomposition (POD)/reduced order model (ROM).
Findings
The results of this paper show that the proposed aeroelastic efficient evaluation method can accurately and efficiently predict the aeroelastic response and flutter boundary when the wing fuel mass vary because of fuel burn. It also shows that the wing fuel mass variations have a significant effect on transonic aeroelasticity; the flutter speed increases as the wing fuel mass decreases. Without rebuilding an expensive, time-consuming CFD-based POD/ROM for each wing fuel mass variation, the computational cost of the proposed method is reduced obviously. It also shows that the computational efficiency improvement grows linearly with the number of model cases.
Practical implications
The paper presents a potentially powerful tool to more intuitively and effectively investigate the influence of the wing fuel mass variation on transonic aeroelasticity, and the results form a theoretical and methodological basis for further research.
Originality/value
The proposed evaluation method makes it a reality to apply the efficient standard CFD-based POD/ROM to investigate the influence of the wing fuel mass variation because of fuel burn on transonic aeroelasticity. The proposed efficient aeroelastic evaluation method, therefore, is ideally suited to deal with the investigation of the influence of wing fuel mass variations on transonic aeroelasticity and may have the potential to reduce the overall cost of aircraft design.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Number 51775518, 11672225, 11511130053 and 11272005), the National Program on Key Research Projects (Number MJ-2015-F-010), the Shannxi Province Natural Science Foundation (Number 2016JM1007) and the founds for the Central Universities (2014XJJ0126).
Conflict of interest statement: There is no conflict of interest.
Citation
Li, D., Wang, Z., Da Ronch, A. and Chen, G. (2022), "An efficient evaluation method for wing fuel mass variations effect on transonic aeroelasticity", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 94 No. 6, pp. 881-894. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEAT-08-2021-0227
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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