Nonlinear Gust Effects On Flexible Aircraft With Flared Hinged Wings

ifasd2024 Tracking Number 137

This paper presents a study on the modelling and coupled dynamic analysis of a flexible aircraft with flared hinged wings. A geometrically-exact composite beam model in a non-stationary reference frame, complemented with Lagrange multipliers to enforce multibody constraints, is coupled with unsteady vortex lattice aerodynamics to perform time domain simulations. A full-vehicle configuration featuring flared hinged wing tips is introduced, based on a high-altitude long-endurance T-tail aircraft. Aeroelastic trim and equilibrium states are computed for both the original vehicle and the modified aircraft with hinged wing tips, for the analysis of 1g plus gust responses in the vertical and lateral directions. Results shed light on the coupled nonlinear aeroelastics and flight dynamics exhibited by various HALE configurations in gust encounters of various intensities. It is found that the response of the aircraft with flared hinged wings considering geometrical nonlinearities is predominantly bounded by that of the stretched and upturned wing tips cases, with nonlinear trends uncovered and weighed in their contributions to the overall coupled system dynamics of aircraft configured as such.