Gust Alleviation of Aeroelastic Aircraft Using CFD Simulation

A CFD study of a gust alleviation technique based on the use of aircraft's control surfaces on the main wing and on the horizontal tail plane is presented. The NASA Common Research model of an airliner is used as the reference configuration. The gust model is based on adding artificial gust velocities into the governing equations, so-called Disturbance Velocity Approach. The gust is identified as a change in the Angle of Attack upstream of the aircraft nose. A series of gusts is used to measure response of the aircraft and to establish the dynamic gust model. The elasticity of the aircraft model is taken into account employing modal analysis and the response of the aircraft structure is studied. The movable control surfaces are defined and characterized by CFD using the mesh deformation technique in the unsteady RANS simulations. Finally, the dynamic model based on both the gust data on one hand and on the control surfaces on the other is exploited to define the controller with the aim to alleviate the gust. The required time response of the movable control surfaces is studied to clarify limits of this alleviation technique.