Fluid-Structure Interaction of HALE Wing Configuration with an Efficient Moving Grid Method

This paper describes an automated process that runs a loosely coupled fluid-structure interaction simulation of a high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) wing that encompasses Delaunay graph based grid deformation. A Tcl scripting language code has been written to couple two commercial CFD and CSD packages and our own moving mesh code for the interaction. The computational fluid dynamics flow solver used is the Fluent package and the coupled implicit method was used to solve the Reynolds-averaged Navier-stokes equations. The computational structural dynamics part was solved using finite element analysis in Ansys. A static linear aeroelastic analysis was carried out to determine the deforming profile of the high aspect ratio wing using data interchange between the two codes. A full internal structure of the wing was constructed to more accurately represent the high-altitude, long-endurance wing. The grid deformation was carried using the Delaunay graph based mesh deformation method, which maintains the mesh topology throughout the entire process.