Student : Pinar Acar
Sponsor : NASA, Aurora Flight Sciences
Summary:
During this project, the University of Michigan has been expected to conduct aeroelastic analyses on a baseline wing configuration, defined in coordination of NASA, to verify the ability of the in-house code, UM/NAST to model its aeroelastic characteristics. UM/NAST has been developed to analyze composite, high-aspect-ratio wings for very flexible aircraft in subsonic flow. The highest flow regimes previously studied with the code were at Mach 0.6, where compressibility effects were introduced through a simple Prandtl-Glauert correction. Recently, the aerodynamic part of the code was extended to include transonic aerodynamics through kriging surrogates, which should be more applicable for this study.
The chosen baseline configuration was NASA’s Common Research Model (CRM). The NASA-provided CRM NASTRAN model was converted by Aurora to beam equivalent stiffness and inertia properties needed for UM/NAST. Once a UM/NAST model of the CRM baseline (isotropic) configuration was created, static and dynamic aeroelastic analyses have been conducted. Two variant wing constructions generated by Aurora, i.e., quasi-isotropic and orthotropic wings, has been also modeled within UM/NAST.
