High aspect ratio wings have been the focus of recent aircraft designs for improved fuel consumption through reducing induced drag. The increase in wing span has also led to folding wing-tips being introduced as a solution for meeting airport gate requirements. Recent studies have suggested such a folding wing-tip solution may be incorporated with spring devices in order to provide an additional gust loads alleviation ability in flight. The current work examines the suitability of using the Doublet-Lattice Method and the Unsteady Vortex-Lattice Method for modelling the dynamic response of such a folding wing-tip device and found that the Doublet-Lattice Method tends to over-predict the achievable gust loads alleviation because it cannot fully capture the coupling between folding and the change in local angle of attack of the wing-tip. Additional analysis also found that when using the Unsteady Vortex-Lattice Method, choosing large displacement method over linear method for solving the structural response only produced minimal difference.
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