A Comparative Study on the Efficiencies of Aerodynamic Reduced Order Models of Rigid and Aeroelastic Sweptback Wings

Abstract

This paper presents the effect of wing elasticity on the efficiency of a nonintrusive reduced order model using a three-dimensional sweptback wing. For this purpose, a computationally low-cost but highly accurate nonintrusive reduced order method is constructed utilizing proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) coupled with radial basis function (RBF) interpolation. The results are evaluated in terms of order reduction and prediction capability of rigid and aeroelastic ROMs. Our results show that compared to the rigid wing, reduced order modeling is more effectively applied to the aeroelastic sweptback wing due to the postponement of flow separation caused by bending–torsion coupling, when the pressure coefficient (Cp) is considered as the output. We further show that for flexible wings, utilizing rigid nodes is not sufficient for presenting the Cp distribution accurately; hence, separate ROMs must be generated for the deformed positions of the nodes. Moreover, the RBF method is also exploited for prediction of the results with direct interpolation of the data ensemble by generating a surrogate model. Finally, the proposed methods are compared in terms of accuracy, computational cost and practicality.