A proposal for aircraft early accurate rapid flutter analysis

A description of modal aircraft flutter analysis is given for both the pre-Finite Element era and the current state of the art Finite Element procedure. Methods of structural and aerodynamic analyses along with methods used to combine them in the flutter analyses are discussed. The proposal is made to perform flutter analysis by direct time stepping solution of the coupled equations of motion early in the aircraft's design cycle—prior to performing a more accurate modal analysis. The process is highly automated, using Knowledge-Based Engineering methods to extract data from a common shared Computer Aided Design solid model to construct the structural Finite Element Model and for the aerodynamic Finite Volume Model. The aerodynamic and structural models are mapped to one another through Non Uniform Rational B-Splines. Appendices with a derivation and computations of a Finite Volume Method are included.