Flutter of Skew Panels by the Matrix Displacement Approach

Abstract

In spite of the large number of published works on panel flutter there appears to be a wide gap in the literature concerning the flutter of skew panels. For instance, recently the flutter behaviour of skew panels in supersonic flow has been presented for a simply-supported boundary condition using double Fourier sine series to represent the deflection surface. Apart from this publication there is practically no literature concerning flutter of skew panels except refs. 3-4 which consider the flutter of skew panels clamped on all the edges. The method used in ref. 3 is the common 4-mode analysis by using the Iguchi functions for representing the deflections and in ref. 4 the same problem is solved by the use of beam characteristic functions. One inherent difficulty in these conventional methods, was that no single function could be chosen to represent the deformation which satisfied various boundary conditions, with the result that the entire analysis may have to be repeated with different assumed functions for accommodating different boundary conditions. Hence, a general method was proposed in ref. 5 for the study of panel flutter problems of arbitrary geometry by the Matrix Displacement Method, which permits application to problems with practically any geometrical boundary conditions on any or all the sides.