Propagation of Parametric Uncertainties in a Nonlinear Aeroelastic System Using an Improved Adaptive Sparse Grid Quadrature Routine

Abstract

A novel uncertainty quantification routine in the genre of adaptive sparse grid stochastic collocation (SC) has been proposed in this study to investigate the propagation of parametric uncertainties in a stall flutter aeroelastic system. In a hypercube stochastic domain, presence of strong nonlinearities can give way to steep solution gradients that can adversely affect the convergence of nonadaptive sparse grid collocation schemes. A new adaptive scheme is proposed here that allows for accelerated convergence by clustering more discretization points in regimes characterized by steep fronts, using hat-like basis functions with nonequidistant nodes. The proposed technique has been applied on a nonlinear stall flutter aeroelastic system to quantify the propagation of multiparametric uncertainty from both structural and aerodynamic parameters. Their relative importance on the stochastic response is presented through a sensitivity analysis.