Analysis of Circular Elastic Membrane Wings

Abstract

Membrane wings, such as sails of yachts and hanggliders, have quite complicated aerodynamic characteristics owing to interactions between compliant wings and the flow around them. All the existing methods of solution for three-dimensional membrane wing theories contain iterative procedures to deal with the strong nonlinearity of the problem. We assumed the uniform tension to weaken this nonlinearity and eliminated the iterative procedures. We applied this method to the problem of circular elastic membrane wings. Numerical results have been compared with experimental results. The consistency between the analysis and the experiment shows the validity of our method. The existence of two equilibria is also confirmed.