Advanced structural models for high-fidelity aeroelastic simulations

In the last decades, the development of composite materials in the aerospace sector has broadened the structural design space, especially with respect to complex problems involving fluid-structure interactions (FSIs) and non-linear aerodynamic phenomena. The full exploitation of the potential offered by composite materials in such applications is critically related to the capability of modelling the involved interactions with suitable fidelity, which is based on the development of reliable structural and aerodynamic models and their consistent coupling. In this work, the combination of the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is adopted to model composite laminates under aerodynamic loading and the structural model is coupled with high-fidelity CFD tools offering the possibility of selecting a variety of different aerodynamic theories. A case study is presented, in which the open source software SU2 is used to solve the Navier-Stokes three-dimensional equations, thus overcoming contingent limitations of low-fidelity aerodynamic analyses. Few preliminary numerical results are presented and discussed to illustrate the potential of the framework being developed.