Differentiable Aeroelastic Framework Suitable for Industrial Modelling of Nonlinear Loads on Accelerators

This paper presents a new simulation environment for time-domain nonlinear aeroelastic analysis built for performance and that is suitable for modern hardware architectures such as GPUs. The numerical library JAX and a novel description of the aircraft dynamics are brought together into a highly vectorised codebase that achieves two orders of magnitude accelerations compare to conventional implementations. This brings full-vehicle simulations to run close to if not in real-time, thus opening new possibilities for aircraft design optimization and aeroelastic analysis. The computational edge provided by GPUs is shown in a free-flying very flexible structure. It follows an extensive verification by comparison with MSC Nastran full-FE linear and nonlinear structural solutions on a representative aeroplane model. ...