A corrected nearest neighbor transpotation method of aerodynamic force for fluid-structure interactions

Aeroelastic analysis of the aircraft is a typical fluid-structure interaction problem. It is influenced by interactions between aerodynamic forces and deformations of elastic structures. The aerodynamic field and structural deformation are modeled by different physical equations, and the associated computational meshes do not match each other. Therefore, passing data from a mesh to the other one in a physically reasonable way is a challenging task. Current aerodynamic force transportation methods, such as virtual work conserved method (VWC), area weighted shape function method (AWSF), proximity minimum strain energy method (PMSE), and inverse distance weighted method (IDW), either destroy physical conservations or cause unreasonable distributions of structural forces. In this paper we propose a corrected nearest neighbor transportation method (CNNT) of aerodynamic force for the fluid-structure coupling analysis. The force transportation process is divided into two phases. First, the aerodynamic forces are allocated to the structural nodes initially using the conventional methods or, e.g., AWSF, IDW. Then, the initially allocated structural forces are corrected by solving an optimization problem with the physical conservations as its optimization target. The optimization problem is solved by a barrier interior point method efficiently. A sport airplane model is employed to verify effectiveness of CNNT. Comparisons with the VWC, AWSF, PMSE, IDW are also made. The numerical experiments show that the CNNT maintains the force, moment, and virtual work conservations, and exhibitsreasonable distributions of structural forces, indeed.