An Approach to Modeling Aeroservoelasticity in MPhys

Aeroelastic design frameworks must be able to include the presence of control surfaces in order to design for aeroservoelastic (ASE) systems. These types of systems (e.g., maneuver load alleviation, active flutter suppression, or gust load alleviation) have the potential to improve fuel efficiency as well as passenger safety and comfort. While many papers in the literature demonstrate the design of these systems with panel-based aerodynamics, doing so with higher fidelity aerodynamics (i.e., with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)) is much less common, especially when unsteady aerodynamics are involved. The present work describes the recent implementation of ASE design tools developed at NASA Langley Research Center. Through the use of the MPhys library for OpenMDAO, panel- and CFD-based aerodynamic solvers may be easily interchanged. To demonstrate static ASE, an optimization with FUN3D Stabilized Finite Element (SFE) aerodynamics is demonstrated, with static control surface deflections being modeled at several off-design cruise conditions as well as at a 2.5g pull-up maneuver. As a demonstration of dynamic ASE, optimizations with doublet lattice method and FUN3D/SFE linearized frequency-domain aerodynamics are shown, where an active flutter suppression controller is designed simultaneously with the other wing design variables.