Modular and Interdisciplinary Methods for Aeroelastic Simulations (MIMAS)

In the context of high aspect ratio wings or blades, aeroelasticity is becoming increasingly crucial for predicting the safety, efficiency, and performance of modern aircraft. This paper describes the development of MIMAS, a computational framework for simulating complex nonlinear aeroelastic phenomena from incompressible to highly transonic flows, in steady or unsteady configurations. On the one hand, MIMAS features advanced mesh deformation and transfer algorithms that have been renewed and optimised to enable faster computations compared to previous implementations within ONERA legacy codes. On the other hand, it offers ready-to-use coupling scenarios to support loose to strong fluid-structure interactions. This environment provides a high-level end-user abstraction layer that allows to couple a wide range of aerodynamic and non-linear structural simulation codes. In addition, the data structure is sufficiently generic to handle both structured and unstructured discretizations. In this paper, we first demonstrate the ability of MIMAS to reproduce existing representative computations such as harmonic forced motion, static coupling and dynamic coupling, without overhead induced by the modular implementation. Second, we present new capabilities of MIMAS, in particular the improved algorithms for mesh deformation and data transfer and its ability to leverage modern HPC architectures.