Dr Sebastian Timme PhD

The detailed description of fluid flow is critical to meet the ambitious economic and environmental targets of future air transportation, in terms of fuel burn and CO2, NOX and noise emissions. Shock buffet is one such example of a grand challenge of transonic aircraft aerodynamics. Despite intense research efforts for the last half a century, the details of the physical phenomenon are not unequivocally accepted.

Two important tasks of aircraft loads and aeroelastics are aeroelastic-stability and gust-loads analyses. The former requires that the aircraft is designed to be free of aeroelastic instability (including flutter, divergence, control reversal, and loss of stability and control due to structural deformation) for all configurations and design conditions. The latter involves the determination of the loads on each part of the structure by dynamic analysis accounting for unsteady aerodynamics, flexible structures, and flight dynamics. In addition, a sufficient number of discrete gust gradient distances must be considered to find the critical case for each quantity of interest, and response to continuous turbulence is required, too.

The challenge of computational fluid dynamics within the multidisciplinary aircraft loads and aeroelastics context is the immense computational cost while offering high fidelity. Model order reduction is an attempt to keep the predictive capabilities of a high fidelity aerodynamic model and, at the same time, it is the chance to enable a more routine application within an industrial setting with significantly reduced computational cost.