Numerical Study on Aeroelastic Response of Cantilevered Plate Under Hypersonic Shock Impingement

This research presents a numerical study of the University of New South Wales Canberra’s Hypersonic Multibody Aeroelastic eXperiment (HyMAX) using both low-fidelity modeling and high-fidelity modeling approaches. The experiment features a cantilevered plate on which a shock wave impinges at a flow deflection angle of 10°. The low-fidelity approach used a two-way coupling approach utilizing an analytical shock-expansion-theory-based piston theory and CFD-enriched piston theory for unsteady aerodynamics calculation and an Euler–Bernoulli beam model for structural calculation. A high-fidelity two-way coupled fluid–structure interaction simulation was used using OpenFOAM, CalculiX, and PreCICE. This study aims to evaluate these models against the experiment on the basis of accuracy and computational efficiency. CFD-enriched piston theory results showed good agreement with the experiment in terms of maximum trailing edge displacement of the plate, highlighting its usefulness in the design of experiments and preliminary aeroelastic analysis. However, it underpredicted the damping of the plate’s oscillation. Viscous laminar fluid–structure interaction simulation showed good agreement in terms of both trailing edge displacement and damping characteristics of the plate when compared with the experiment. The dynamic nature of the shock-wave/boundary-layer interaction region was also studied during the plate’s oscillation. A strong correlation was observed between the length of the separation bubble and the deflection of the plate.