Multidisciplinary simulation of the maneuvering of an aircraft

A computational methodology for the simulation of the transient aeroelastic response of an unrestrained and flexible aircraft during high-G maneuvers is presented. The key components of this methodology are: (a) a three-field formulation for coupled fluid/structure interaction problems: (b) a second -order time-accurate and geometrically conservative flow solver for CFD com putations on unstructured dynamic meshes; (c) a corotational finite element method for the solution of geometrically nonlinear and unrestrained struct ural dynamics problems; (d) a robust method for updating an unrestrained an d unstructured moving fluid mesh, and (e) a second-order time-accurate stag gered algorithm for time-integrating the coupled fluid/structure semi-discr ete equations of motion. This computational methodology is illustrated with the simulation on a parallel processor of several three-dimensional high-G pullup, maneuvers of the Langley Fighter in the transonic regime, rising a detailed finite element aeroelastic model.