Survivability of an aircraft in combat is achieved by not getting hit, or withstanding the effects of any suffered hits. To assess the latter aspect of survivability, live-fire tests are performed. However, these tests may fail to provide complete vulnerability assessments because they do not address the effects of threat-damage on the aeroelastic stability of an aircraft. Current vulnerability assessment toolkits such as AJEM and COVART do not fare better. They cannot capture in general the vulnerabilities linked to aeroelastic effects. Yet, these effects can lead to the abortive impairment of the ability of an aircraft to accomplish its designated mission, or cause its premature failure. To address this issue, CMSoft, Inc. proposes to develop, validate and demonstrate the feasibility of a computational tool for the evaluation of the aeroelastic effects of threat-damaged flight surfaces in support of aerospace platform vulnerability assessments based on AERO Suite and a Bayesian framework for constructing surrogate models.The benefits to the end user of this tool are the enabling of the prediction of the effect of a given structural damage on the aeroelastic behavior of a military aircraft and the definition of critical damage/flight conditions constituting a loss of its load-carrying capability.aeroelasticity,aerothermoelasticity,aircraft survivability,aircraft vulnerability,Bayesian framework,combat damage assessment,Flutter,surrogate model
