Nonlinear ground vibration identification of an F-16 aircraft - Part 2: Understanding Nonlinear Behaviour in Aerospace Structures Using Sine-sweep Testing

摘要

Although they are generally modelled as linear systems, aircraft structures are known to be prone to nonlinear phenomena. A specific challenge encountered with fighter aircraft, besides aeroelastic nonlinearity, is the modelling of the wing-to-payload mounting interfaces. For large amplitudes of vibration, friction and gaps may be triggered in these connections and markedly impact the dynamic behaviour of the complete structure. In this series of two papers, the nonlinear dynamics of an F-16 aircraft is investigated using rigorous methods applied to real data collected during a ground vibration test campaign.The present work focuses on the analysis of sine-sweep measurements in order to get an insightful understanding about the nonlinear behaviour of the aircraft. To this extent, restoring force surface and wavelet transform methods are applied both on the collected GVT data and simulation results performed on a simple numerical model of the F-16 wing and its payload.