PhD defense - F. Blanc

Numerical methods for aircraft control surfaces aeroelasticity

Delivered by ISAE Toulouse
Speciality: Fluid dynamics

December 16, 2009 - CERFACS

In order to develop new aircraft control systems Airbus is currently developing its capability to predict aeroelastic effects related to the use at high speed of control surfaces located on flexible parts of the aircraft. Following this path, the presented work aims at developing numerical methods to simulate this type of phenomenon. Starting from existing computation techniques, which are based on a coupling between computational fluid dynamics techniques, two research axis have been followed. The first one deals with the control surfaces representation in the fluid dynamics computation. To ease this representation and allowing the control surface motion during the computation Chimera technique has been used. This technique allows combining elementary overlapping pieces of mesh during the computation. On that point a new method for assembling Chimera meshes has been dev developed. The second research axis deals with adapting existing aeroelasticity computation technique. As a matter of fact it appeared that these computation techniques were not suitable for the computation of problems related to control surfaces. To tackle this issue the Time Spectral Method has been applied to the equations of aeroelasticity, leading to a new scheme for coupling fluid and structure equations. The methods presented are applied to various industrial configurations.

JF. Gerbeau	Research director - INRIA, Rocquencourt	Referee
L. Joly	Professor - ISAE, Toulouse	Member
P. Hémon	Research engineer - LadHyX, Palaiseau	Member
P. Larrieu	Engineer - AIRBUS, Toulouse	Member
T. Poinsot	Senior researcher - IMFT, Toulouse	Member
FX. Roux	Researcher - ONERA, Chatillon	Advisor