The integrated design of aerodynamic, structural, and control systems is essential to the development of new commercial aircraft. The validation of such a design by numerical simulations requires solving simultaneously the appropriately coupled fluid, structural, and control equations of motion. Consequently, the numerical simulation of an integrated aircraft design is computationally intensive. They propose to develop high performance computational methodologies for addressing such challenging problems, and apply them to the investigation of an Oblique Flying Wing (OFW) and a Corporate Supersonic Transport (CST). The OFW is of great interest because it corresponds to an optimum aerodynamic and structural combination, and offers speed and large size. Moreover its control is likely to be most challenging. On the other hand, the CST is perhaps the first civilian supersonic aircraft that will be built after the Concorde. While the control of the CST can be expected to be less difficult than that of the OFW, it will still demand considerable computational resources. The proposed research is multidisciplinary and includes several components: computational fluid dynamics, computational structural mechanics, dynamics and active control, as well as applied mathematics, numerical analysis, computer science, and parallel processing. The proposed research will be carried out primarily by Dr. Pei Li, under the supervision of Professor Farhat, with the assistance of Professors Seebass and Lawrence. The necessary training in computational methods and parallel processing, and the needed computer resources will be provided.
