| Summary: | Morphing wings, which control the flight by changing their own shapes, have attracted much attention by their potential for improving aerodynamic performance. Corrugated structures, which have flexibility in the corrugation direction and high rigidity in the transverse direction to the corrugation, were proposed as good candidates for morphing wings. This research suggests a new fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis model which shows better accuracy at low computational cost for the design of flexible morphing wings. A RANS based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver, UTCart, and a panel method, XFOIL, are both implemented in the FSI analysis combined with nonlinear flexible beam model in the present scheme. Aerodynamic pressure distributions obtained using UTCart are different from those obtained by the traditional XFOIL analysis, especially when angle of attack is high. This leads to the differences in the driving forces to deform the wing. In contrast, the differences in the deformed shapes of the airfoils are relatively small between the two. With the knowledge obtained above, a new FSI analysis model is proposed; in the FSI analysis model, firstly the deformation of the airfoil in the airflow is analyzed using XFOIL, and after the deformation shape is obtained, UTCart evaluates the aerodynamic performances and the pressure distribution of the converged airfoil, and finally the driving force is recalculated using the pressure distribution newly obtained by UTCart.
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