Aeroelastic Reduced Order Model: Kriging-Corrected Potential Flow

A novel aeroelastic reduced order model is developed for two-dimensional gust interaction modeling in transonic flows. Such conditions exhibit a key nonlinearity: sonic shock motion. The proposed approach comprises an aerodynamics reduced order model coupled to a structural model. The aerodynamics model consists of corrected integrated force coefficients computed by an unsteady potential flow method (incompressible vortex panels). The corrections are obtained from kriging surrogates trained using inviscid compressible computational fluid dynamics data. Two gust lengths (namely, long and short) are simulated for this purpose and serve as the upper and lower bounds of the model. The developed aeroelastic reduced order model is evaluated via modeling untried gust cases, the lengths of which fall between the training cases. Applied to the FFAST Crank and NACA0012 airfoils, the approach accurately reproduces aeroelastic response-with deviations never exceeding 8.0 and 10.5%, respectively. In terms of computational cost, the trained models were more than an order of magnitude faster than the computational fluid dynamics simulations.