The design space for new air vehicles, both manned and unmanned, is tending toward lighter and more flexible structures. Understanding the aeroelastic system is of critical importance. Given the potentially destructive nature of flutter and its ability to rapidly manifest into a serious threat to the health of the vehicle, it must be included as a consideration in any test program. As such, a toolset is required that can perform modal identification in real-time. Identifying the modal properties (frequency, damping ratio, and mode shape) alone is not enough, the toolset must also include means to clearly and concisely present these results to the control room engineer. To complicate the problem further, the driving excitation is often unknown and the identification method must be capable of operating using output-only sensor data. To meet these challenges, a real-time identification method and toolkit was developed that operates in the frequency domain using output-only data. This identification technique was integrated into a more complete analysis framework that includes multiple methods for examining the identified modal properties: mode shape animations, and frequency and damping time history trends. Additionally, a demonstration of this complete toolset was performed using both simulated and flight test data collected from an experimental, aeroelastic unmanned aerial vehicle.
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