Advanced UAV Aerodynamics, Flight Stability and Control

4Nonlinear Reduced‐order Aeroservoelastic Analysis of Very Flexible Aircraft

Nikolaos D.Tantaroudas¹ and Andrea DaRonch²

¹ European Dynamics, SA, Athens, Greece

² University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

This chapter overviews the technical difficulties that aerospace engineers have to face during the design of environmentally friendly aerial vehicles. Present trends in aerospace design are driven by two factors: increasing the global aerodynamic efficiency and reducing the structural weight to a minimum. The failure in flight of some prototypes of very flexible aircraft, as described in Section 4.1, has shown that traditional (linear) methods are no longer adequate for the analysis and design of future aerial platforms. In Section 4.2, the reader will be introduced step by step to the mathematical models needed to predict the complex interactions that may occur between the aerodynamic, structural, flight mechanical, and control fields. The computational costs of these models, however, are high because of the large number of calculations needed to ensure structural integrity over the flight envelope, and such computational costs are not viable for industrial aircraft design. The latest developments in the field of model reduction will be discussed in Section 4.3, and the reader will have the opportunity to practice and use these mathematical models, utilising the programming codes associated with this chapter. Finally, active control techniques to enhance the performance and ...