On the Effects of Stiffness Ratio in Nonlinear Aeroelastic Stability of a Folding Wing

In this paper, the effects of stiffness ratio in nonlinear aeroelastic stability of a folding wing by using the geometrically exact fully intrinsic beam equations are investigated. The important advantages of these equations in comparison with other structural beam equations are complete modeling without simplifying assumptions in large deformations, low-order nonlinearities, and thus less complexity. For the first time, folding angles have been implemented in the geometrically exact fully intrinsic beam equations and hence this is the main novelty of this study. The applied aerodynamic loads in an incompressible flow regime are determined using Peter’s unsteady aerodynamic model. In order to check the stability of the system, first the resulting non-linear partial differential equations are discretized, and then linearized about the nonlinear steady-state condition. By obtaining the eigenvalues of the linearized system, the stability of the wing is evaluated. Furthermore, investigation of the effects of the stiffness on the flutter speed of the folding wing for various folding angles, is another achievement of this study. It is observed that the geometrically exact fully intrinsic beam equations can model the folding angles for the aeroelastic analysis more accurately.