Linearized aeroelastic analysis for a launch vehicle in transonic flight conditions

The purpose of the present work is the development of a linearized aeroelastic modeling and analysis for a launch vehicle in the neighborhood of a transonic flight condition. A two-dimensional airfoil transonic case selected from the technical literature (specifically, a MBB-A3 supercritical airfoil in unsteady transonic regime) has been studied to validate the procedure for identifying the linearized unsteady aerodynamics. The present methodology has been successively performed for the system identification of the linearized aerodynamics of the VEGA European small launch vehicle in a transonic flow phase and in presence of an angle of attack. This has been achieved by performing several prescribed modal-transient boundary conditions on a Euler-based computational-fluid-dynamics code and postprocessing the input/output data in the frequency domain. Finally, both a standard eigenanalysis and an iterative eigenanalysis have been performed to study the aeroelastic stability on the linearized model of the launch vehicle in transonic flow. The nature of the methodology is quite general and can be applied in the neighborhood of any arbitrary parametric flight condition of a launch vehicle. Copyright © 2005 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.