Static Aeroelastic Analysis of a Supersonic Flight Vehicle with a Ramjet Engine

Abstract

This paper presents a static aeroelastic analysis for a supersonic flight vehicle with a ramjet engine. First, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to estimate its baseline geometry aerodynamics and the results obtained upon the vehicle surface are transferred to the structural analysis. The structural analysis is then carried out. Both an in-house MATLAB shell analysis and MSC/NATRAN three-dimensional shell analysis are used in the present static aeroelastic analysis. To solve a resulting large-scale system equation, we adopt FETI method for in-house shell analysis and validate by MSC/NASTRAN results. For the critical condition which corresponds to the flight speed of Mach 3.0, the present static aeroelastic analysis results reveal that there occur no critical deformation or buckling in the present vehicle. As a result, a detailed analytical procedure for the static aeroelastic analysis is established to predict a possibility of the critical deformation or buckling induced in the supersonic flight vehicle.