TABLE OF CONTENTS A variety of engineering problems encountered in practice exhibit behavior that is predicated by the interaction of complex physical phenomena, i.e., their response is determined not by a single phenomena but by multidisciplinary interaction. This real behavior is in contrast to much of the current design practice in which analysis is frozen in each separate discipline. The situation where this static approach is inadequate is in the design of modern high performance aerospacecraft that are characterized by complex aerothermal-structural-controls-propulsion interaction. Hypersonic vehicles, in particular, are expected to exhibit unprecedented levels of multidisciplinary interaction among the disciplines of structural dynamics, propulsion, aerodynamics, heat transfer, and controls engineering that may impose considerable constraint on the dynamic stability and controls performance margins stipulated for flight safety. The accurate prediction of flight characteristics is thus of utmost importance to ensure safe vehicle design and acceptable levels of performance.
Multidisciplinary analysis requires the capability to model the simultaneous influences of the fluids/aerodynamics, structural dynamics, propulsive forces, control system dynamics, and actuation in a coupled and integrated computational environment. All potential couplings between separate disciplines demand time-accurate solutions of the thermofluid electromechanical interactions in a computational simulation of adequate fidelity for stability analysis.
The analysis methods are beyond the capabilities of simple closed-form solutions and it is necessary to develop numerical techniques to obtain approximate solutions. The choice of an appropriate methodology for modeling of the various associated solution domains and the accurate simulation of the relevant forces at their respective boundaries is of utmost...
