Bifurcation Prediction of Large-Order Aeroelastic Models

Computational aeroelasticity has become an active area of research in the past decade. Effort has been put into coupling between computational fluid dynamic and finite element solvers and into model reduction to make the resulting simulations more useful for practical analysis. This paper is the latest in a series that describe research toward making eigenvalue-based stability analysis routine for large-scale computational-fluid-dynamic-based semidiscrete systems. The particular contribution of this paper is to formulate the problem in a framework that exploits the Schur complement. This effectively allows the different parts of the system,lacobian to be treated in a decoupled way, with the final result being a small nonlinear eigenvalue problem for the stability analysis. The calculation of this small system can be done robustly in parallel. Results to illustrate the performance of the method are presented for model wings and full aircraft test cases.