Stochastic collocation method for secondary bifurcation of a nonlinear aeroelastic system

A stochastic collocation method is proposed to investigate the secondary bifurcation of a two-dimensional aeroelastic system with structural nonlinearity represented by cubic restoring forces, and uncertainties expressed by random parameters in the cubic stiffness coefficient and in the initial pitch angle. The accuracy of the stochastic collocation method is improved by incorporating higher order schemes, such as piecewise cubic interpolation and piecewise cubic spline interpolation, instead of a piecewise linear interpolation formula. For an aeroelastic problem with the uncertainty expressed by a time dependent combination of five random variables, an efficient collocation method is developed using a sparse grid approach with a dimension adaptive strategy. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for long term computation and discontinuous problems.