IMU-based deformation reconstruction for highly flexible wings

ifasd2024 Tracking Number 94

The wings of high aspect ratio are typically highly flexible, resulting in significant elastic deformations during flight. The aerodynamic shape of the aircraft undergoes substantial changes, reflecting pronounced geometric nonlinearity in deformation characteristics. Such extensive deformations render traditional aeroelastic analysis methods, based on the assumption of small deformations, inapplicable. Therefore, there is a need for nonlinear analysis methods to enable real-time monitoring of large wing deformations. This paper proposes a wing deformation reconstruction method based on distributed inertial measurement units. By establishing the coordinate transformation relationship between the local coordinate system and the reference coordinate system at any arbitrary measurement point before and after the deformation of highly flexible wings, a correlation between wing deformation and the output information from distributed inertial measurement units is established. Position and orientation information is obtained through coordinate transformation and numerical integration of the output from inertial measurement units: where and are acceleration and angular velocity from IMU, the subscript b and g represent the IMU at B and G, the superscript represents the skewed symmetric matrix , is the transformation matrix from B to G and is the position vector from B to G. The overall configuration of the wing at any given moment can be interpolated by synthesizing the position and orientation information from various measurement points. Time-domain simulations and numerical calculations are conducted on a highly flexible wing model (Fig.(a)), validating the proposed method. The results of wingtip deformation (Z-direction) reconstruction are presented in Fig.(b). Fig. (a) Highly flexible wing model and (b) wingtip z-direction deformation reconstruction The findings indicate that the deformation recognition accuracy is satisfactory within a certain time frame. However, beyond a specific duration, the accumulation of errors, such as noncommutativity rotation errors and numerical integration errors, causes the algorithm results to gradually deviate from the actual deformation values.