Computational Unsteady Aerodynamics in Aeroelastic Simulations

An affordable unsteady aerodynamics method suitable for three-dimensional aeroelastic simulations is presented. The method solves the unsteady Euler/Thin-Layer Navier-Stokes equations on a deforming mesh. The spatial discretization is based on a cell-centered scheme and employs an upwind method using Roe's flux difference splitting (FDS). The temporal integration is carried out efficiently in an implicit manner in which a set of nonlinear equations is solved at each time step using a relaxation method. Further, the method is parallelized using a domain decomposition technique. Discussions concerning the requirements for aeroelastic simulation, the solution method and some applications are presented. The quality of the numerical results and the turn-around time of the method demonstrate the applicability of the current method for routine aeroelastic simulation purposes.