Aeroelastic Modeling of Morphing Aircraft Wings

摘要

An analytical aeroelastic model to investigate the aeroelastic stability of a span morphing aircraft is derived. Structural and aeroelastic models are derived with the pa-rameteric variations introduced by a span morphing wing. Dynamic aeroelastic stability analysis is performed with thin airfoil theory and CFD. A CFD analysis of span morphing shows the lift increases in a non-linear fashion during the morphing process, and after the morphing is completed. The flutter analysis, based on the CFD results, shows a significant reduction in flutter velocity during morphing due to inertial, elastic and aerodynamic variations, and due to the flow evolution after the morphing period. This study shows that the development of low fidelity aeroelastic models of morphing wings, supplemented with high fidelity analysis, can quantify the phenomena associated with the morphing and also serve as precursor to a computationally expensive, fully coupled high fidelity simulation of flutter due to morphing.