Solution of linear systems in Fourier-based methods for aircraft applications

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics Fourier-based methods have found increasing use for aircraft applications in the last decade. Two applications which benefit are aeroelastic stability analysis and flight dynamics for which previous work is reviewed here. The implicit solution of the methods considered in this work requires an effective preconditioner for solving the linear systems. New results are presented to understand the performance of an approach to accelerate the convergence of the linear solver. The computational performance of the resulting solver is considered for flutter and dynamic derivative calculations.

Keywords:

• frequency domain methods
• linear frequency domain
• harmonic balance
• aeroelasticity
• flight dynamics
• preconditioning

Acknowledgements

A. McCracken is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Airbus.