Differentiable Aeroelastic Framework Suitable for Industrial Modelling of Nonlinear Loads on Accelerators

ifasd2024 Tracking Number 82

This paper presents a new simulation environment for time-domain nonlinear aeroelastic analysis built for performance and that is suitable for modern hardware architectures such as GPUs. The numerical library JAX and a novel description of the aircraft dynamics are brought together into a highly vectorised codebase that achieves two orders of magnitude accelerations compare to conventional implementations. This brings full-vehicle simulations to run close to if not in real-time, thus opening new possibilities for aircraft design optimization and aeroelastic analysis. The computational edge provided by GPUs is shown in a free-flying very flexible structure. It follows an extensive verification by comparison with MSC Nastran full-FE linear and nonlinear structural solutions on a representative aeroplane model. Furthermore, the nonlinear gust response of an industrial configuration with over half a million degrees-of-freedom is computed, and it is faster than its frequency-based, linear equivalent as implemented by commercial packages. Therefore this could be harnessed by aircraft loads engineers to add geometrically nonlinear effects to their existing workflows at no extra computational effort. Finally, automatic differentiation on both static and dynamic responses is validated against finite-differences.