Aeroelastic computations on wing-body-control configurations on parallel computers

A multizonal capability for aeroelastic computation of complex geometries has been implemented in ENSAERO, an aeroelastic analysis code with Euler/Navier-Stokes now solver, on the IBM SP2 parallel computer. The discipline parallelization is achieved by distributing the fluid, structure, and control domains onto different groups of computational nodes. The fluid domain is further parallelized based on the multizonal method. The coupling between the fluids and structures is obtained by exchanging the interface boundary data at every iteration by using the explicit message passing interface standard library. The performance of the current implementation shows that about 12 computational nodes of the SP2 computer are equivalent to the speed of a single C90 processor. For demonstration purposes, static aeroelastic computations coupled with control surfaces are made for an arrow wing-body-control configuration in the transonic how regime. Computed pressure coefficients for a rigid configuration were compared with the mind-tunnel experiment. The two results show good agreement. Steady aeroelastic simulations are made with and without control surface deflections. The static aeroelastic simulations show that the effect of flexibility is significant on aerodynamic coefficients. It is noted that the flexible wing lowered the sectional lifts compared to the rigid wing. This procedure can be utilized for the fast computational solution of large-scale mind-tunnel models and real configurations that inevitably deform under aerodynamic loads.