Multifidelity Aeroelastic Model for Corrugated Morphing Structures

Abstract

In this paper, an efficient aeroelastic model for morphing structures with corrugated panels is proposed, combining different fidelities of aerodynamic models. A finite element method with an actuation model is used to analyze the structural deformation of morphing structures. A vortex lattice method and Cartesian-grid-based computational fluid dynamics are individually coupled with the structural model to build the medium- and high-fidelity aeroelastic models. Three different morphing cases are simulated with the two fidelities of aeroelastic models to understand the influence of the model fidelity on the simulation results. Based on the comparison study, a new efficient aeroelastic model is proposed where the medium-fidelity aeroelastic model speeds up the calculations in the aeroelastic loop and the high-fidelity aeroelastic model computes accurate aerodynamic characteristics and necessary actuation loads. Computational time of the proposed method is half of the high-fidelity model while maintaining the computational accuracy.