Rapid gust response simulation of large civil aircraft using computational fluid dynamics

Several critical load cases during the aircraft design process result from atmospheric turbulence. Thus, rapidly performable and highly accurate dynamic response simulations are required to analyse a wide range of parameters. A method is proposed to predict dynamic loads on an elastically trimmed, large civil aircraft using computational fluid dynamics in conjunction with model reduction. A small-sized modal basis is computed by sampling the aerodynamic response at discrete frequencies and applying proper orthogonal decomposition. The linear operator of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations plus turbulence model is then projected onto the subspace spanned by this basis. The resulting reduced system is solved at an arbitrary number of frequencies to analyse responses to 1-cos gusts very efficiently. Lift coefficient and surface pressure distribution are compared with full-order, non-linear, unsteady time-marching simulations to verify the method. Overall, the reduced-order model predicts highly accurate global coefficients and surface loads at a fraction of the computational cost, which is an important step towards the aircraft loads process relying on computational fluid dynamics.