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

In this paper, the effects caused by the combination of folding angles simultaneously with changing the stiffness ratio of different parts of a folding wing are investigated. The geometrically exact fully intrinsic equations are employed to simulated the wing nonlinear dynamic behavior. The important advantages of these geometrically exact equations can be seen as complete modeling without simplifying assumptions in large deformations, low-order nonlinearities, and thus less complexity. In this research, folding angles have been used in the geometrically exact fully intrinsic beam equations and the combination of different folding angles is studied. The applied aerodynamic loads in an incompressible flow regime are determined employing 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 and frequency of the folding wing for various folding angles, is another achievement of this study. It is observed that the combination of folding angles can significantly delay the flutter speed and improve the performance of the bird.