Static aeroelastic analysis including geometric nonlinearities based on reduced order model

This paper describes a method proposed for modeling large deflection of aircraft in non-linear aeroelastic analysis by developing reduced order model (ROM). The method is applied for solving the static aeroelastic and static aeroelastic trim problems of flexible aircraft containing geo-metric nonlinearities; meanwhile, the non-planar effects of aerodynamics and follower force effect have been considered. ROMs are computational inexpensive mathematical representations com-pared to traditional nonlinear finite element method (FEM) especially in aeroelastic solutions. The approach for structure modeling presented here is on the basis of combined modal/finite ele-ment (MFE) method that characterizes the stiffness nonlinearities and we apply that structure mod-eling method as ROM to aeroelastic analysis. Moreover, the non-planar aerodynamic force is computed by the non-planar vortex lattice method (VLM). Structure and aerodynamics can be cou-pled with the surface spline method. The results show that both of the static aeroelastic analysis and trim analysis of aircraft based on structure ROM can achieve a good agreement compared to anal-ysis based on the FEM and experimental result.