Aircraft Structural Dynamics

Aircraft Structural Dynamics

An evaluation of aerodynamic and structural models is carried out for their application to flight dynamics of low-speed An evaluation of aerodynamic and structural models is carried out for their application to flight dynamics of low-speed aircraft with very-flexible high-aspect-ratio wings. The structural dynamic approaches include displacement-based, strain-based, and intrinsic (first-order) geometrically-nonlinear composite beam models, while thin-strip and vortexlattice methods are considered for the unsteady aerodynamics. We first show that all different beam finite-element models (previously derived in the literature from different assumptions) can be consistently obtained from a single set of equations.