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Paper

TESTING March 16, 2026

Nonlinear Model Order Reduction for Coupled Aeroelastic-Flight Dynamic Systems

Authors

Nikolaos D. Tantaroudas, Andrea Da Ronch, Ilias Karachalios, Kenneth J. Badcock

Abstract

A systematic approach to nonlinear model order reduction (NMOR) of coupled fluid-structureflight dynamics systems of arbitrary fidelity is presented. The technique employs a Taylor series expansion of the nonlinear residual around equilibrium states, retaining up to third-order terms, and projects the high-dimensional system onto a small basis of eigenvectors of the coupled-system Jacobian matrix. The biorthonormality of right and left eigenvectors ensures optimal projection, while higher-order operators are computed via matrix-free finite difference approximations. The methodology is validated on three test cases of increasing complexity: a three-degree-of-freedom aerofoil with nonlinear stiffness (14 states reduced to 4), a HALE aircraft configuration (2,016 states reduced to 9), and a very flexible flying-wing (1,616 states reduced to 9). The reduced-order models achieve computational speedups of up to 600 times while accurately capturing the nonlinear dynamics, including large wing deformations exceeding 10% of the wingspan. The second-order Taylor expansion is shown to be sufficient for describing cubic structural nonlinearities, eliminating the need for third-order terms. The framework is independent of the full-order model formulation and applicable to higher-fidelity aerodynamic model

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2603.15296
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: cs.CE
Published: 2026-03-16
Fetched: 2026-03-17 06:02

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