Elastic wind tunnel model design via eigenvector-based level-set topology optimization

In the field of aeroelasticity, acquiring both static and dynamic aeroelastic characteristics via wind tunnel test is useful. However, designing elastic wind tunnel models has been conventionally laborious. To address this issue, this study aims to develop a numerical method for designing elastic wind tunnel models by taking advantage of additive manufacturing technique. The wind tunnel model is designed to have equivalent static responses, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors to full-scale aircraft. The internal structure of the wind tunnel model is reconstructed using topology optimization. The optimization is performed using a level-set-based method with conforming meshes. The proposed method successfully optimized the static characteristic to meet a target static characteristic. ...