Effect of Inboard and Outboard Folding Angles on Aeroelastic Characteristics of a Folding Wing

Abstract

Morphing aircrafts such as folding wing can fly efficiently at varying flight conditions and therefore they have the potential to replace existing fixed wing aircrafts. Structural changes in aircrafts wing form can have vast effect on the structural and aerodynamic characteristics of folding wing. Dynamic aeroelastic instability such as flutter of flight vehicle structure can lead to catastrophic structural failure of aircraft. For this reason, flutter characteristics should be thoroughly investigated and research needs to be performed to determine possible means of improving flutter characteristics of morphing wings. In this paper, flutter characteristics of baseline folding wing with varying inboard folding angle is investigated and validated, then parametric study is carried out by varying outboard folding angle. Folding wing is modeled using MSC. Patran Flight Loads. Flutter analysis of the flat plate folding wing is performed using P-k method in MSC.NASTRAN solver. Results obtained from the flutter analysis demonstrates that up to certain inboard folding angle flutter speed improves with the increase of inboard wing folding angle and through combination of inboard and outboard folding angle optimal flutter speed can be achieved.