Nonlinear airship aeroelasticity

The aeroelastic derivatives for today's aircraft are calculated in the concept phase using a standard procedure. This scheme has to be extended for large airships, due to various nonlinearities in structural and aerodynamic behaviour. In general, the structural model of an airship is physically as well as geometrically nonlinear. The main sources of nonlinearity are large deformations and the nonlinear material behaviour of membranes. The aerodynamic solution is also included in the nonlinear problem, because the deformed airship influences the surrounding flow. Due to these nonlinearities, the aeroelastic problem for airships can only be solved by an iterative procedure. As one possibility, the coupled aerodynamic and structural dynamic problem was handled using linked standard solvers. On the structural side, the Finite-Element program package ABAQUS was extended with an interface to the aerodynamic solver VSAERO. VSAERO is based on the aerodynamic panel method using potential flow theory. The equilibrium of the internal structural and the external aerodynamic forces leads to the structural response and a trimmed flight state for the specified flight conditions (e.g. speed, altitude). The application of small perturbations around a trimmed state produces reaction forces and moments. These constraint forces are then transferred into translational and rotational acceleration fields by performing an inertia relief analysis of the disturbed structural model. The change between the trimmed flight state and the disturbed one yields the respective aeroelastic derivatives. By including the calculated derivatives in the linearised equation of motion system, it is possible to judge the stability and controllability of the investigated airship.