An Aeroelastic Flight Dynamics Model for Gust Load Alleviation of Energy-Efficient Passenger Airplanes

Abstract

Gust load alleviation (GLA) can reduce the maximum loads encountered by airplanes, allowing the structure to be designed lighter, thus saving fuel. Active GLA therefore represents an important subarea in the research of energy-efficient passenger airplanes. However, from a flight dynamics perspective, there are no publicly available simulation environments that allow for an efficient and modular investigation of different technologies like novel GLA controllers or novel flow actuators. Therefore, this paper presents such a simulation environment. The presented aeroelastic flight dynamics model is based on indicial functions combined with a dynamic stall model to predict the unsteady aerodynamics similar to a strip theory approach, while the downwash is considered using a nonlinear steady lifting line method. The structural dynamics are based on the mode displacement method and coupled with the aerodynamics model using constant transformation matrices as well as nonlinear transformations for the inflow. A comparison of the presented model with unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier--Stokes simulations shows good agreement for a selected gust case. The presented simulation model is parameterized as an energy-efficient passenger airplane with a light-weight wing sizing by reducing the limit loads from 2.5\,g to 2.0\,g for equivalent pull-up maneuvers. Open-loop gust load envelopes are presented and discussed for the energy-efficient airplane with different model settings, e.g. with and without dynamic stall model. The source code of the simulation modules is available at: https://github.com/iff-gsc/se2a_aviation_2023. A video of the flight simulation is available at: https://youtu.be/cO5q06Qkkgk