Structural and aerodynamic characteristics of additively manufactured flexible wings

Abstract

Various high-performance structures are ready to fabricate with the advent of the technology for the additive manufacturing. This additive manufacturing technology has a potential to improve manufacturing costs and may help to achieve high-performance aerospace structures. One of application candidates would be a wind tunnel wing model. A wing tunnel model requires sophisticated designs and precise fabrications for accurate experiments, which frequently increase manufacturing cost. At the same time, there are design trends of high aspect ratio wings to enhance flight performance of aircraft. Those wings may undergo large deformation during flights. Therefore, a geometrically nonlinear aeroelastic analysis of such flexible wings plays important role in design. In this paper, manufacturing accuracy and aeroelastic characteristics of an additively manufactured wing model are evaluated numerically and experimentally. The feasibility of such wings to use in wind tunnel tests is also demonstrated. In addition, a geometrically nonlinear aeroelastic analysis model, which have been developed in the previous study, is validated by comparing with results of the wind tunnel test for the additively manufactured highly flexible wing model. The effect of geometrical nonlinearity in aeroelastic characteristics of a highly flexible wing has been observed in the comparison between linear and nonlinear aeroelastic solutions and the wind tunnel result.