Wind Lidar Axes Optimization for Gust Reconstruction

To reduce the environmental impact of civil aviation, future aircraft configurations will be equipped with Very High Aspect Ratio Wings. Such wings enable to reduce the drag but its structural sizing is a challenge to minimize the wing weight due to high structural constraints. A technique consists in using adaptive wings that modify their shape according to the gust measured ahead of the airplane using wind lidar. To determine the 3D wind field, the lidar is addressed along different axes to obtain the projections of the wind along each of them. In this paper, we present a methodology for optimizing lidar axis angles to best estimate the 3D wind field.