TABLE OF CONTENTS In the previous chapter a fully integrated aeroelasticity and also aeroservo- elasticity analysis procedure was described for a complete aircraft configuration. This approach is limited because the linearized aerodynamic theories used in this connection are not valid in the transonic range and further simplifying assumptions regarding the vehicle geometry need to be made to conform to the linearizing assumptions.
Modern, high performance aerospace vehicles are characterized by unprecedented levels of multidisciplinary interactions of a number of major technical disciplines including structures, aerodynamics, heat transfer, and controls engineering, which may impose considerable constraint on dynamic stability and controls performance margins required for flight safety. Accurate prediction of the flight characteristics prior to flight testing is thus of vital importance and requires employment of more accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) procedures for the aerodynamic computations. There are a number of recently published results of research work in the application of CFD to aeroelastic analysis involving unsteady flows. Reference [1] summarizes activities that utilize finite difference methods for the solution of lower-order CFD methods as the transonic small disturbance and the full potential equations in the aeroelastic analysis and also for effective control of flutter [2]; finite difference solution for practical problems have also been reported. [3] , [4] Extensive efforts have been made recently using structured aerodynamic grids and a finite volume solution of Euler equations [5] , [6] has also been reported. Further extensions of this work employing unstructured meshes are described in Ref. [7]
