State Space Reduced Order Models for Static Aeroelasticity and Flight Mechanics of Flexible Aircrafts

A methodology to merge state-space time domain realizations of a complete numerical aeroservoelastic model with flight mechanics equations is presented. The connection can be easily accomplished by projecting the rigid body generalized aerodynamic forces onto a stability-reference axes system. A minimum-states formulation for the unsteady aerodynamic loads is obtained by resorting to balanced truncation techniques to reduce the dimension of an initial high order model. The resulting system of equations is formulated in terms of the natural degrees of freedom for the rigid body motions, consequently it allows to solve within a unified framework all the dynamic and static aeroelasticity problems in the time domain.