Aeroelasticity of an aircraft wing with nonlinear energy sink

Abstract

In this paper, the effectiveness of nonlinear energy sinks on enhancing aeroelastic stability and post-instability response of aircraft wings is investigated. The wing has two degrees of freedom in bending and torsion, and is modelled using an extended Euler-Bernoulli beam theory with hardening nonlinearity. A Nonlinear Energy Sink (NES) absorber is embedded inside the wing distributed along the wing span. The wing attached unsteady aerodynamic loads are simulated using the Wagner's indicial lift model. The structural dynamics of the wing are derived using Extended Hamilton's Principle and it is discretised using Galerkin's method. The NES mass is connected to the wing spar through a linear damper and nonlinear spring with a cubic stiffness nonlinearity. The coupled aeroelastic equations are then transformed to state space. Then, integrated numerically to resolve the bending and torsional response of the wing to study the impact of spanwise and chordwise positions of the embedded NES on flutter suppression and instability response enhancement. The results demonstrate that the NES is most efficient and is most sensitive to changes in the stiffness when placed at the wingtip. For a given chordwise location, it is found that there is a range of flow speeds over which the NES is most effective and reducing the chordwise offset lowers the speed of the peak efficiency range and moves it closer to the flutter speed. In addition, increasing the stiffness coefficient of the NES improves the efficiency of the device in the immediate post-flutter region. Two near optimum NES devices are proposed with a mass ratios of 1% (located at the wingtip) and 2.5% (located at 75% span). Both of these improve the flutter speed by 5%, and reduce the post-flutter response by 64.5% and 59.2%, respectively.