Experimental And Numerical Activities For Aeroelastic Analysis Of An Aluminum Wing

In the aerospace field, comprehensive monitoring of systems structural behavior is imperative for enhancing structural safety, optimizing maintenance protocols, and predicting remaining useful life. New significant challenges have been raised in recent years by market innovations such as the use of composite materials and high aspect ratio geometries. These solutions generate lightweight components featuring larger deformations with increasing fluid loading. To deal with these features, this work pursues the long-term goal of establishing a validated procedure that combines the use of different methodologies for Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problems. A multi-physics environment, including experimental and numerical analyses, is constructed to allow for FSI analysis of an aluminum wing featuring a NACA 0018 profile during wind tunnel testing. An extensive test campaign has been conducted on such specimen in the wind tunnel of the University of Twente adopting a clamped-free configuration. The unit under test has been instrumented with different measurement systems such as strain gauges, pressure ports, and high-speed cameras for vision-based methods. To complement the experimental activities, both a structural and an aerodynamic model have been built and validated using experimental reference data. The Finite Element Model (FEM) has been built in Simcenter 3D and updated to match the experimental modal parameters identified via Experimental Modal Analysis (EMA) during an impact test conducted prior to wind tunnel testing. A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis has been conducted in Simcenter STAR CCM+ and validated via experimental pressure values. To pursue the objective of implementing a comprehensive FSI framework for aeroelastic analysis, a first step proposed in this work consists in combining the validated FEM with a few strain measurements to reconstruct the full-field structural response as well as the pressure field around the wing during testing. This approach, referred to as Virtual Sensing (VS) is hereby implemented using a modified version of the Augmented Kalman Filter (AKF), tailored for applications involving distributed loading conditions. The achieved results are validated against the full-field measurements extracted via DIC.