Aircraft control via variable cant-angle winglets

Copyright @ 2008 American Institute of Aeronautics and AstronauticsThis paper investigates a novel method for the control of "morphing" aircraft. The concept consists of a pair of winglets; with adjustable cant angle, independently actuated and mounted at the tips of a baseline flying wing. The general philosophy behind the concept was that for specific flight conditions such as a coordinated turn, the use of two control devices would be sufficient for adequate control. Computations with a vortex lattice model and subsequent wind-tunnel tests demonstrate the viability of the concept, with individual and/or dual winglet deflection producing multi-axis coupled control moments. Comparisons between the experimental and computational results showed reasonable to good agreement, with the major discrepancies thought to be due to wind-tunnel model aeroelastic effects.This work has been supported by a Marie Curie excellence research grant funded by the European Commission

Seismic assessment of the Matera cathedral

This paper presents the seismic assessment of the Cathedral of Matera, in southern Italy, to determine the capacity of the structure when subjected to earthquakes. This church dates back to the 13th century and is one of the most representative monuments of the Apulian Romanesque architecture. Within the context of the evaluation of the seismic response of the cathedral, modal identification tests were performed in order identify and characterize the main dynamic properties of the structure. The results of these tests were used to develop a representative finite element model, which is able to provide the response to seismic actions. A pushover analysis was performed to characterize the seismic behavior of the structure. The results of the seismic analyses on the cathedral show that its vulnerability is high, being the transversal direction the less stiff and resistant. Elements as the nave and the façade, along with the bell tower, might be the most vulnerable to seismic actions. Additionally, it was observed that components as the trusses of the central nave strongly modify the seismic response and capacity of the structure. Apparently, the structure might not be able to withstand a strong earthquake from the region or might present several damage after one. Hence, it is recommendable to perform further studies about the seismic behavior, especially of the most vulnerable elements.The authors would like to acknowledge the University of Minho for supporting the experimental campaign. Thanks is also extended to Dr. Nuno Mendes, University of Minho, for his guidance and help for performing the in-situ tests on the cathedral. The authors would also like to thank to the ELARCH project number 552129-EM-1-2014-1-IT-ERASMUS MUNDUS-EMA 21 for funding the graduate studies of the first author

The effect of curved tips on the dynamics of composite rotor blades

In this paper, the dynamics of a tailored composite rotating blade with curved tips are investigated, with a view to improving the dynamic behaviour of the blade in flight. The blade tip is curved either in the out-of-plane or in the in-plane directions. The composite blade is modelled by using the exact beam formulation, and the cross-sectional properties of the blade are obtained using the variational asymptotic method. The resulting nonlinear partial differential equations are discretised using a time-space scheme, and the stationary and rotating frequencies of the blade are obtained from the eigenvalues of the linearised system. Three case studies are considered here each of them representing one of the main elastic couplings that might happen in a composite blade. These three elastic couplings are the flap-twist, lag-twist, and extension-twist couplings. All these couplings are very important in the blade design as they can affect the twist and hence the dynamics of the blade. The blade tip length and curvature value are two main parameters that this paper is focused on. It is shown that the curved tip of the blade affects the blade frequencies by adding extra couplings, and therefore could be used as a potential morphing concept for tuning the frequencies, enhancing the aeroelastic stability or performance of the blade in flight

Asynchronous partial contact motion due to internal resonance in multiple degree-of-freedom rotordynamics

Sudden onset of violent chattering or whirling rotorstator contact motion in rotational machines can cause significant damage in many industrial applications. It is shown that internal resonance can lead to the onset of bouncing-type partial contact motion away from primary resonances. These partial contact limit cycles can involve any two modes of an arbitrarily high degree-of-freedom system, and can be seen as an extension of a synchronisation condition previously reported for a single disc system. The synchronisation formula predicts multiple drivespeeds, corresponding to different forms of mode-locked bouncing orbits. These results are backed up by a brute-force bifurcation analysis which reveals numerical existence of the corresponding family of bouncing orbits at supercritical drivespeeds, provided the dampingis sufficiently low. The numerics reveal many overlapping families of solutions, which leads to significant multi-stability of the response at given drive speeds. Further secondary bifurcations can also occur within each family, altering the nature of the response, and ultimately leading to chaos. It is illustrated how stiffness and damping of the stator have a large effect on the number and nature of the partial contact solutions, illustrating the extreme sensitivity that would be observed in practice

A pulse size estimation method for reduced-order models

Model-Order Reduction (MOR) is an important technique that allows Reduced-Order Models (ROMs) of physical systems to be generated that can capture the dominant dynamics, but at lower cost than the full order system. One approach to MOR that has been successfully implemented in fluid dynamics is the Eigensystem Realization Algorithm (ERA). This method requires only minimal changes to the inputs and outputs of a CFD code so that the linear responses of the system to unit impulses on each input channel can be extracted. One of the challenges with the method is to specify the size of the input pulse. An inappropriate size may cause a failure of the code to converge due to non-physical behaviour arising during the solution process. This paper addresses this issue by using piston theory to estimate the appropriate input pulse size

Candidate reduced order models for structural parameter estimation

Introduction Structural parameter estimation is the identification of the physical structural parameters such as mass, damping, and stiffness, or possibly geometric parameters. In practical applications an estimate for these parameters will exist and the estimation process updates these estimates. In linear systems this becomes the estimation of the mass, damping, and stiffness matrices. No papers have been published that directly tackle the major problem of the high model order of theoretical finite element models. This paper argues that in many practical situations reducing the order of a linear model, while maintaining its dependence on unknown parameters, can be beneficial and suggests some order reduction methods. Irrespective of the method used the parameters to be estimated should be carefully selected. Generally the dimension of the measurement vector is considerably smaller than the order of the finite element model. The input to output relationship, even in the absence of noise, could be reproduced by an infinite number of mass, damping, and stiffness matrices. Thus to obtain accurate estimates of physical parameters the choice of which parameters to estimate is important. If mass, damping, and stiffness matrices are available, for example, from a theoretical finite element analysis, then updated matrices "closest" to those of the initial model could be chosen. But even this does not consider the special structure of a typical finite element model. If a homogeneous continuum is discretized then the only unknowns would be the mass, damping, and stiffness properties of the material and the geometry of the modelled item. The elements of the matrices defining the system model will not be independent of each other. In principle it is unreasonable and unnecessary to identify whole mass, damping, and stiffness matrices