High-Altitude Airship Propeller Fluid–Structure Interaction Solver

This paper presents a study on fluid–structure interaction (FSI) solver for propellers of composite materials, which are commonly used on high-altitude airships and require FSI consideration for better propulsion optimal design. The FSI solver consists of an aerodynamic solver and a structural solver. The aerodynamic solver is a RANS (Reynolds Average Navier–Stokes) solver based on an in-house code named ROTNS. The structural solver is based on the secondary development of a commercial finite element software using Patran Command Language (PCL). The general framework of the FSI solver is built using C++ language and a weak coupling approach. To validate the accuracy of the solver for propulsion optimal design, wind tunnel test, ground static thrust test and structural deformation test were conducted. The numerical results show good agreement with the experimental results.