Hi,

Are there any commercial software out there that can handle static aeroelastic problems, specifically in regard to wing tip twist ?

Any pointers much appreciated.

Cheers Aldrin

I'm not certain about commercial codes since I don't deal with them regularly. However you would need one which provides the coupled fluid/structural interaction and which handles the deformations of the surface in redistributing the computational grid. ADINA and CFD-ACE are the only commercial packages I can think of off hand which may be appropriate.

My M.S. thesis was in computational static aeroelasticity, and the flow solver I used was USM3D, which is available from Dr. Neal T. Frink at NASA Langley. While this was back in 1995, I believe Neal still supports the aeroelastic methods I implemented, which employed a simplified Rayleigh-Ritz polynomial displacement field for the wing deformations. I'm not certain where you are writing from, but keep in mind there may be export issues with releasing the code to non-US sites. USM3D is a 3-D upwind unstructured solver for tetrahedral meshes.

Dr. Frink may be contacted at n.t.frink@larc.nasa.gov, and you may provide my name as a reference.

Good luck

Peter A. Cavallo