Numerical simulation of 3-D wing flutter with fully coupled fluid–structural interaction

A numerical methodology coupling Navier–Stokes equations and structural modal equations for predicting 3-D transonic wing flutter is developed in this paper. A dual-time step implicit unfactored Gauss-Seidel iteration with the Roe scheme is employed for the flow solver. A modal approach is used for the structural response. The flow and structural solvers are fully coupled via successive iterations within each physical time step. The mesh-deformation strategy is described. The accuracy of the modal approach is validated with ANSYS. The results indicate that the first five modes are sufficient to accurately model the wing-structure response for the studied case of this paper. The computed flutter boundary of AGARD wing 445.6 at free stream Mach numbers ranging from 0.499 to 1.141 agrees well with the experiment.