Uncertainty quantification of aeroelastic stability of composite plate wings using lamination parameters

Abstract

An approach is presented for modelling the aeroelastic stability of composite laminate wings with ply orientations subject to uncertainty. An aeroelastic model is constructed using the Rayleigh–Ritz technique coupled with modified strip theory aerodynamics. Lamination parameters are used as inputs to a Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE), enabling efficient propagation of the uncertainty through the aeroelastic model for a composite laminate with any number of plies. The Rosenblatt transformation is used to adapt the lamination parameter distributions for use with the PCE. A modified approach for modelling the uncertain aeroelastic response near the boundaries of different regimes of behaviour is also presented. Two case studies demonstrate application of the techniques; the first applies a simple PCE to a number of example balanced and symmetric laminates, the second applies the modified approach in a parametric investigation of the effects of bend–twist coupling on response mechanism. The proposed techniques offer at least an order of magnitude reduction in computation time compared to baseline Monte Carlo Simulation for all of the cases investigated.