Aeroelastic Analysis of Unrestrained Aircraft Wing with External Stores Under Roll Maneuver

This paper discusses our study on the flutter of an unrestrained aircraft wing carrying a fuselage at its semispan and arbitrary placed external stores under roll maneuver. Maneuver terms are combined in the governing equations which are obtained using the Hamilton’s principle. The wing is represented by a classical beam and incorporates bending-torsion flexibility. Theodorsen unsteady aerodynamic pressure loadings are considered to simulate the aeroelastic loads. The Galerkin method is subsequently applied to convert the partial differential equations into a set of ordinary differential equations. Numerical simulations are validated against several previous published results and good agreement is observed. In addition, simulation results are presented to show the effects of the roll angular velocity, fuselage mass, external stores mass, and their locations on the wing flutter of an aircraft in free-flight condition. Parametric studies show that the predicted flutter boundaries are very sensitive to the aircraft rigid body roll angular velocity, fuselage mass and external stores mass and locations.