Computational aeroelastic analysis of wings based on the structural discontinuous Galerkin and aerodynamic vortex lattice methods

An original computational framework for the aeroelastic analysis of wings featuring general transverse section is developed. The framework is based on the coupling between a novel discontinuous Galerkin structural model and an aerodynamic vortex lattice method, which is implemented in both the planar and non-planar version. The structural model, which constitutes the novelty of the present work, allows generalized kinematics and is thus able to capture higher-order structural deformation modes. With respect to other more used structural representations, the discontinuous Galerkin approach is based on the use of discontinuous basis functions and suitably-defined boundary terms to enforce the inter-element continuity and boundary conditions. Such features naturally enable high-order accuracy, ease of parallelization and, specifically for this work, straightforward coupling with the vortex lattice method. The framework is validated through benchmark tests, providing favourable matching with reference literature data.