Aeroelastic hybrid testing for industrial applications

ifasd2024 Tracking Number 33

Aeronautical structures, due to uncertainties and nonlinearities, require extensive experimental testing for both design and certification, especially concerning their aeroelastic behavior. Such experimental procedures are conducted through both wind tunnel tests and flying prototypes. The latter introduces risks to personnel, entails higher costs, and provides considerably less control over external factors. At the same time, wind tunnel tests offer safety, affordability, repeatability, and control over external variables. However, due to the limitations of the wind tunnel test section, only scaled models or limited portions of the whole structure can be tested, resulting in a lack of interaction with surrounding aero-structural systems. Hybrid Testing (HT) is an advanced experimental technique in structural engineering that combines physical testing with numerical simulations to assess the behavior of complex structures and systems under various loading conditions. In HT, the structure of interest is divided into physical and numerical substructures and then combined to form a hybrid structure reproducing the behavior of the original system. In the existing literature, HT has been primarily applied to academic simplified aeroelastic systems. This work aims to evaluate the feasibility of HT for aeroelastic industrial applications, considering two case studies. In the first case, an aeroelastic straight untapered half-wing is examined. The second case involves a modification of the FFAST (Future Fast Aeroelastic Simulation Technologies) aeroelastic model representing a civil commercial aircraft with hinged wingtips. In this work, both virtual and physical substructures are simulated. A transfer system ensures force and displacement compatibility between the numerical and physical substructures through a control system employing sensors and actuators. For both cases, sensors and actuators are modelled to study the effects of the transfer system delay and limit bandwidth. Additionally, to ensure the correctness of the HT, an innovative combination of an active and passive transfer system is proposed.