Unsteady Aerodynamic Sensitivity Analysis with FEniCS

Summary

Sensitivity analysis is considered a fundamental tool in aerospace engineering, allowing to evaluate the impact of parameters variations, and optimize the aerodynamic and structural design. There has been much effort in the development of both theoretical and numerical frameworks for sensitivity calculations through adjoint solutions. Regarding the implementation of these analyses into agile and versatile numerical tools, the use of scalable and transferable libraries has become of particular importance. In this work, FEniCS is used to calculate the sensitivity of aerodynamic observables in different flow condition. A comparison with different theoretical and benchmark cases is used to validate the methodology before applying it to further and more complex configurations, expanding the scope of the analyses to unsteady flows.

Abstract

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