Aeroelastic wind tunnel test model design and experiment on very flexible high-aspect-ratio wings

The aeroelastic characteristics for a very flexible aircraft is the focus of present theoretical research, and the wind tunnel experiment is the necessary way to view the mechanism of large aeroelastic motion and to validate the theoretic method. In order to study the influence for geometric nonlinearity of high-aspect-ratio wings, a wind tunnel model is designed and constructed. With the combination of the theoretic analysis of geometric nonlinear aeroelasticity and the vibration test of the model, the aeroelastic wind tunnel test is performed on the base of consistency between the analysis model and the test model. The experiment results show that the large deformation of a high aspect ratio wing will affect the aeroelastic property to some extent. The large deformation causes the instability of the horizontal bending mode and decreases the flutter speed, which are coincident with the predictions by the nonlinear aeroelastic theoretic method. The flutter speed and the flutter mode are all in a good agreement with those of the theoretic method. Thusly, the availability and accuracy for the geometric nonlinear aeroelastic analysis method is verified.