Advanced rotor systems including hingeless and bearingless rotors have air and ground resonance instabilities due to coalescence of low frequency rotor modes with landing gear and fuselage modes, respectively. The rotor blade is connected to the rotor hub via a flexure or flexbeam. The modal coalescence is of difficulty due to the lack of a clear hinge in these advanced rotor systems. We are currently exploring the mitigation of this modal coalescence through the use of active damping techniques and electro-rheological fluid technology. An emulation of a flexbeam was fabricated from a glass epoxy composite, and filled with ER fluid, to determine feasibility of using ER fluid for active damping of the flexbeam.
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