Prediction of the aeroelastic behavior An application to wind-tunnel models

Abstract: The work of this paper has been done during a Master thesis at the ONERA and deals with the establish-ment of an aeroelastic state-space model and its application to two wind-tunnel models studied at the ONERA. The established model takes into account a control surface input and a gust perturbation. The generalized aerodynamic forces are approximated using Roger’s and Karpel’s methods and the inertia of the aileron is computed using a finite element model in Nastran. The software used during this work was Capri, developed by the ONERA, and results validity was checked using Nastran. Comparisons between frequency response functions obtained with the aeroelastic state-space model and experimental ones show that the model gives good results in no wind conditions for an aileron deflection input and up to transonic speeds. Differences between model and experiments could be inputable to structural non-linearities.