Aeroelastic analysis of panels in compressible flows

This work develops a method to solve fluid-structure problems based on the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian, ALE, formulation using the central finite difference, explicit Runge-Kutta time-stepping scheme. This model builds on earlier ones that involve ALE with finite elements instead of finite differences, in order to obtain higher-order space and time approximations which are necessary for some aeronautical applications. Numerical tests are carried out for an airfoil and a panel using the Euler equations with Mach numbers ranging from 0.2 to 2.0 and the results are shown to compare favourably with available data found in the literature.