In the design of modern aircraft it is essential to incorporate as much information as possible in the conceptual design phase; decisions made in this phase can "lock in" as much as 90% of the costs of the project. It is becoming increasingly important to incorporate unsteady aerodynamic criteria into the design at an early stage; this is the topic in the Solicitation. There may be many iterations of the design and this has led to the need for modeling tools that are accurate and computationally fast. This proposal is concerned with the fast prediction of the loads in unsteady transonic flow. Frequently the transonic flow regime is where the most critical unsteady loads occur. The innovation proposed in Phase 1 is the development of a method that allows sufficiently fast estimation of the aerodynamic loads for conceptual design. This technique will be coupled in Phase 2 with other techniques developed by the author and others to provide a comprehensive prediction capability that can be used for conceptual or preliminary design.If successful the research will lead to the development of commercially viable software for the prediction of unsteady transonic flow. This method will be sufficiently fast for use in an optimizer; there is a market for this type of product in the aerospace industry.
Keywords: Phase_I, NASA, Abstract, FY94
