Dr Andrea Da Ronch (ADR) is a New Frontiers Fellow and Lecturer of Aircraft Structural Design at UOS, and an Industry Secondee at Airbus Operations Ltd, U.K. ADR has a PhD degree (2012) in Computational Aeroelasticity and Flight Dynamics from the University of Liverpool, UK. His research interests are in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods for aeroelasticity and flight dynamics, and in the development of nonlinear model reduction techniques for large computational models. The impact of his research activities has garnered considerable international visibility within the aeroelastics and flight dynamics communities: his initial involvement with the Next generation Conceptual Aero-Structural Sizing (NeoCASS, https://www.neocass.org/) software has now been superseded by an active role in the development of the Computerised Environment for Aircraft Synthesis and Integrated Optimisation Methods (CEASIOM, http://www.ceasiom.com/) software, considered one of the world’s most mature software tools for integrated aircraft design. ADR is also conducting cutting-edge research of very flexible aircraft, from rapid CFD methods for loads assessment over the flight envelope to control synthesis design based on linear/nonlinear and adaptive feedback/feedforward algorithms.

ADR is currently Principle Investigator (PI) of three research projects. ADR is PI of the project “Fast Nonlinear Aeroelastic Search for Loads Assessment” awarded by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) under the Netwon Research Collaboration Programme with Beihang University, China, as overseas partner. Before joining the UOS, ADR has been an active member of the EU-funded SimSAC project (FP6) and the EPSRC-funded FlexFlight project.

 

Introduction to the lecture:

Aircraft design procedures for structural sizing and topological configuration often focus on the aeroelastic behaviour of the vehicle due to the catastrophic potential of the associated fluid?structure interactions. Computational tools currently used in industry for aeroelastic loads assessments fall into the extremes of high fidelity simulations, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models with an integrated Computational Structural Model (CSM), versus rapid linear methods. Heavy computational burdens of the former approach prevent it from being used in aircraft design processes. As such, recent challenges in industrial aircraft aerodynamics have been to decrease the calculation costs of high accuracy aeroelastic loads assessment from months to days, and to increase the fidelity of methods used early on in design processes. This study aims to make progress in this area through production of a novel improved fidelity rapid method which will challenge the simplifications and unsound conventions currently widely adopted in industrial aircraft design. Methods used in the work utilise a recent Infinite Swept Wing ‘2.5D’ Navier-Stokes solver implemented by the research group in the DLR Tau code. Viscous data from the 2.5D solver is then coupled with an inviscid Vortex Lattice Method using an iterative angle of attack correction, providing three dimensional results with viscous effects at the cost of two dimensional simulations. Once validated, the method is applied to the Onera M6 wing and the DLR F4 wing body at low transonic conditions. In both cases, the current method has shown good agreement with experimental data and 3D simulations. Upcoming developments in the work will extend to model to include fuselage corrections, before testing its performance with the high lift DLR F11 (KH3Y) configuration.