Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Fast Control Surface Deflections

The development of load alleviation for an aircraft requires an accurate and efficient prediction of gust and manoeuvre loads. In the design of an aircraft the prediction of these unsteady loads has become crucial for the ideal alleviation of gust loads. A database for unsteady aerodynamic responses is however very cost expensive and time consuming to generate, in an experiment and with numerical simulations. An efficient tool for the computation of aerodynamic responses is the Linear Frequency Domain solver, which allows the prediction of amplitude and phase shift of any periodic oscillation of body or flow in the frequency domain. With the results the unsteady response for any arbitrary unsteady change of in example a control surface or a gust is predicted extremely fast and efficiently. A wind tunnel experiment was thereby setup, which allowed for fast control surface deflections and validated the capabilities and the accuracy of the method.