Enhanced Unsteady Vortex Lattice Aerodynamics for Nonlinear Flexible Aircraft Dynamic Simulation

This repository contains the scripts and code used for the SHARPy simulations obtained for the results shown in the journal paper

[1] Duessler, S., & Palacios, R.. Enhanced Unsteady Vortex Lattice Aerodynamics for Nonlinear Flexible Aircraft Dynamic Simulation. AIAA Journal, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2514/1.J063174

This paper discusses several modelling extensions and numerical improvements to the unsteady vortex-lattice method used for the simulation of very flexible aircraft dynamics. These enhancements include:

Fuselage aerodynamics are included by means of linear source panels.
Sectional polar corrections are incorporated into the aerodynamics under potentially large deformations.
A new wake discretization scheme is derived to accelerate the computations.

These enhancements have been implemented to the nonlinear aeroelastic simulation environment SHARPy which is included in this repository as a submodule, as well as the SHARPy version of the (Super)Flexop model used as a flexible demonstrator model. The scripts in this repo include only the pre and postprocessors for the results in the AIAAJ paper.

Visualization of the SuperFLEXOP's Gust Response simulated with SHARPy

Installation

Clone the repository to your local computer. Navigate into the sharpy folder

cd <path-to-repository>/lib/sharpy

and install SHARPy as described in the documentation.

Alternatively, you can use a SHARPy distribution that is already installed on your machine. The SHARPy version used was v2.1. If you have problems with a newer version of SHARPy, please revert to that one.

Structure of this Repository

01_Case_Generator: Includes all files necessary to generate the SHARPy input files using the (Super)FLEXOP model.
02_Nonlifting: Includes the scripts to generate the verification study results for the fuselage-wing effects as well as the fuselage radii effect shown on the SuperFLEXOP.
03_Polars: Includes all scripts necessary to reproduce the polar results for the SuperFLEXOP.
04_Gust_Response: Includes all scripts to generate the gust response results for the SuperFLEXOP including wake discretisation and polar effects.
05_FLEXOP Verification: Includes all scripts to generate the steady aeroelastic results for the FLEXOP and its comparison to the reference data.
06_Convergence_Study: Generates the data for the convergence study included in the appendix.

Running Simulations

First, activate SHARPy's conda environment

conda activate sharpy

and append the location of the flexop-model folder to the system's path with

source <path-to-flexop-model>/bin/FLEXOP_vars.sh

Now, the user should be all set. Note that some scripts include the postprocessing and plotting steps in seperate scripts. If you would, for example, like to run the gust response simulations, set your desired inputs and run

python <path-to-repository>/04_Gust_Response/generate_flexop_gust_response.py

and run subsequently the postprocessor followed by the plottings script (please check your inputs there too)

python <path-to-repository>/04_Gust_Response/postprocess_flexop_gust_response.py
python <path-to-repository>/04_Gust_Response/plot_flexop_gust_response.py

Copyleft

We are happy to share our efforts with the community and we welcome contributions to the code base. If you found this dataset useful we would kindly ask you to cite the paper [1] and the linked Zendono archive with doi included in [1] in any publications or reports based on it.

Contact

If you have any questions and want to get in touch, contact us.