Aeroelastic Response of a Z-Shaped Folding Wing During the Morphing Process

This paper presents the development of an aeroelastic analysis approach for the dynamic response of a Z-shaped folding wing. The structural model is established by the finite element method and the component mode synthesis method by accounting for the configuration changing effects on the inertial and stiffness characteristics. The aerodynamic model is directly built using the continuous-time state-space unsteady vortex lattice method. The coupling relationship between structural and aerodynamics models is proposed innovatively with interpolation between structural generalized coordinates and incremental normal vectors on the collocation points of aerodynamic panels. The resulting aeroelastic model with the state-space equation can be used for flutter and dynamic response analysis by considering a rapid folding/unfolding process. The analysis results show that the folding and unfolding processes have opposite effects on both the aerodynamic load and aeroelastic characteristics. Moreover, the effects become more significant with an increasing morphing rate.