A recent consideration in aircraft design is the use of folding wing-tips with the aim of enabling higher aspect ratio configurations with less induced drag whilst also meeting airport gate limitations. This study builds on previous work investigating the effect of exploiting the folding wing-tips in-flight as a device to reduce dynamic gust loads, but now with the introduction of a passive nonlinear negative stiffness hinge spring. A single degree of freedom model and a representative civil jet aircraft aeroelastic model were used to investigate the dynamic gust response for different hinge device designs. It was found that significant reductions in the dynamic loads were possible.
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