The proposed Phase I effort is highly relevant to on-going and future NASA projects in NASA's fixed wing project under Fundamental Aeronautics Program. NASA's fixed wing projects involving several non-conventional design concepts such as the Truss-Braced Wing (TBW), Blended Wing Body (BWB), and Supersonic Business Jet (SBJ). Because of the BWB's flying-wing-type and the SBJ's slender fuselage designs, these designs are prone to the BFF (Body Freedom Flutter) problem. In addition, it is expected that the gust loads, on the high aspect ratio wing of the TBW configuration, will be one of the critical design loads. The proposed work will offer a computational tool to the NASA designers for early exploration of technologies and design concepts that exploit the trade-off between the passive and active approaches for mitigating the potential aeroelastic problems associated with those non-conventional configurations.
The design of an efficient maneuver, and Gust Load Alleviation (GLA) as well as flutter suppression controller requires an enormous amount of wind tunnel testing and flight testing to tune the control laws. An accurate aeroservoelastic model based on the Navier-Stokes flow equations would greatly enhance the early design of the controller and reduced wind tunnel and flight test time. The Linearized FUN3D can provide accurate steady and unsteady aerodynamics and can be applied to many categories of flight vehicles including blended wing-bodies, joined-wings, sub/supersonic transports, morphing aircraft, space planes, reusable launch vehicles, and similar revolutionary concepts pursued. Hence, the proposed research and its outcomes will be highly needed for designing the next generation of civil as well as military aircraft to meet the stringent future performance goals.
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