Static aeroelastic analysis including geometric nonlinearities based on reduced order model

Abstract This paper describes a method proposed for modeling large deflection of aircraft in nonlinear aeroelastic analysis by developing reduced order model (ROM). The method is applied for solving the static aeroelastic and static aeroelastic trim problems of flexible aircraft containing geometric nonlinearities; meanwhile, the non-planar effects of aerodynamics and follower force effect have been considered. ROMs are computational inexpensive mathematical representations compared to traditional nonlinear finite element method (FEM) especially in aeroelastic solutions. The approach for structure modeling presented here is on the basis of combined modal/finite element (MFE) method that characterizes the stiffness nonlinearities and we apply that structure modeling method as ROM to aeroelastic analysis. Moreover, the non-planar aerodynamic force is computed by the non-planar vortex lattice method (VLM). Structure and aerodynamics can be coupled with the surface spline method. The results show that both of the static aeroelastic analysis and trim analysis of aircraft based on structure ROM can achieve a good agreement compared to analysis based on the FEM and experimental result.