Scaling Laws for Flight Control Development and Testing in the Presence of Aeroservoelastic Interactions

The exibility of current and next generation aircraft can lead to coupling between the ight dynamics and the aeroelastic modes, particularly the interaction between the short-period and the rst wing bending modes. Development of ight control laws without considering the structural dynamics can lead to suboptimal performance. The present work is focused on examining these interactions to facilitate the design of a subscale vehicle whose dynamics will su ciently capture the interactions present in the fullscale vehicle. A parametrization of the aircraft, and the resulting nondimensional groups, are discussed which would provide complete similitude according to Buckinghamtheory. However, this complete similitude is unfeasible, so partial similitude is investigated using two approaches. First, the classical approximations of the ight dynamic modes are used to reduce the order of the coupled model, and consequently the number of scaling parameters required to maintain the physics of the system. The second approach uses sensitivity of the response to errors in the aircraft's nondimensional parameters. Both methods give a consistent set of nondimensional parameters which do not have signi cant in uence on the aeroservoelastic interaction. These parameters do not need to be scaled, thus leading to a viable scaled model.