M4 ENGINEERING, INC. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: A1

Description

While advances have been made in the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools to the aeroelastic and aeroservoelastic analysis of flexible flight vehicles, during the design phase, unsteady lifting surface methods based on the doublet-lattice methodnbsp;or the harmonic gradient method are still the dominant tools used.nbsp; We propose anbsp;tool that would (1) be at least as accurate as current lifting surface tools in the flight regimes where they are known to be valid, (2) offer a solution across the Mach regime from subsonic to moderately supersonic (Mach 3 or so), (3) capturenbsp;the fundamental physics of shocks in the transonic regime, (4) have a comparable computational cost to lifting surface/panel codes, and (5) be integrated with standard aeroservoelastic analysis and design tools.