FLEXOP – Application of aeroelastic tailoring to a flying demonstrator wing

Abstract

This paper presents the application of aeroelastic tailoring in the wing design of a flying demonstrator. The work is part of the Flutter Free Flight Envelope eXpansion (FLEXOP) project, funded under the Horizon 2020 framework. The project involves the design, manufacturing and flight-testing of a UAV toward two principle goals: i) to demonstrate the passive load alleviation potential through composite tailoring, ii) to validate methods and tools for flutter modelling and flutter control. The work presented here addresses the first of the above mentioned goals. The design of the primary load-carrying wing-box in this task is performed using a joint DLR – TU Delft optimization strategy. In total, two sets of wings are designed in order to demonstrate the potential benefits of aeroelastic tailoring – i) a reference wing wherein the laminates of the wing-box members are restricted to balanced and symmetric laminates; ii) a tailored wing wherein the laminates are allowed to be unbalanced, hence allowing for the shear-extension and bending-torsion couplings essential for aeroelastic tailoring. The optimized design is then manufactured and extensively tested to validate and improve the simulation models corresponding to the wing design. Flight tests are scheduled to be performed in late 2018 to demonstrate the load alleviation capabilities attained through the applied aeroelastic tailoring.