Academic literature on the topic 'Flutter Prediction'

The flutter is a dangerous aeroelastic instability that can cause dramatic failures. It is important to evaluate in which conditions it can occur to ensure the safety of the pilots and the passengers. As flight tests are very expensive and hazardous, the need for efficient and trustworthy numerical tools becomes essential. This report focuses on two methods to predict the flutter conditions in the transonic domain. To evaluate the accuracy of these tools, their results are compared to experimental data gathered during a wind-tunnel test. The influence of the Mach number and the angle of attack on the flutter conditions is studied and physical explanations are put forward.

Flutter analyses and tests are the major items in flight certification efforts required when a new air vehicle is developed or when a new external store is developed for an existing aircraft. The flight envelope of a new aircraft as well as the influence of aircraft modifications on an existing flight envelope can be safely determined only by flutter tests. In such tests, the aircraft is instrumented by accelerometers and exciters. Vibrations of the aircraft at specific dynamic pressures are measured and transmitted to a ground station via telemetry systems during flutter tests. These vibration data are analyzed online by using a flutter test software with various methods implemented in order to predict the safety margin with respect to flutter. Tests are performed at incrementally increasing dynamic pressures and safety regions of the flight envelope are determined step by step. Since flutter is a very destructive instability, tests are performed without getting too close to the flutter speed and estimations are performed by extrapolation. In this study, pretest analyses and flutter prediction methods that can be used in various flight conditions are investigated. Existing methods are improved and their applications are demonstrated with experiments. A novel method to predict limit cycle oscillations that are encountered in some modern fighter aircraft is developed. The prediction method developed in this study can effectively be used in cases where the nonlinearities in aircraft dynamics and air flow reduce the applicability of the classical prediction methods. Some further methods to reduce the adverse effects of these nonlinearities on the predictions are also developed.

This dissertation deals with the instability, known as flutter, of the lifting and control surfaces of aircraft of advanced design at high altitudes and speeds. A simple model is used to represent the aerodynamics for flutter analysis of a two-degree-of-freedom airfoil system. Flutter solutions of this airfoil system are shown to be algebraically homomorphic in that solutions about different elastic axes can be found by mapping them to those about the mid-chord. Algebraic expressions for the flutter speed and frequency are thus obtained. For the prediction of flutter of a wing at transonic speeds, an accurate and efficient computer code is developed. The unique features of this code are the capability of accepting a steady mean flow regardless of its origin, a time dependent perturbation boundary condition for describing wing deformations on the mean surface, and a locally applied three-dimensional far-field boundary condition for minimizing wave reflections from numerical boundaries. Results for various test cases obtained using this code show good agreement with the experiments and other theories.

Recent design trends in steam turbines strive for high aerodynamic loading and high aspect ratio to meet the demand of higher efficiency. These design trends together with the low structural frequency in last stage steam turbines increase the susceptibility of the turbine blades to flutter. Flutter is the self-excited and self-sustained aeroelastic instability phenomenon, which can result in rapid growth of blade vibration amplitude and eventually blade failure in a short period of time unless adequately damped. To prevent the occurrences of flutter before the operation of new steam turbines, a compromise between aeroelastic stability and stage efficiency has to be made in the steam turbine design process. Due to the high uncertainty in present flutter prediction methods, engineers use large safety margins in predicting flutter which can rule out designs with higher efficiency. The ability to predict flutter more accurately will allow engineers to push the design envelope with greater confidence and possibly create more efficient steam turbines. The present work aims to investigate the influence of tip clearance flow on the prediction of steam turbine flutter characteristics. Tip clearance flow effect is one of the critical factors in flutter analysis for the majority of aerodynamic work is done near the blade tip. Analysis of the impact of tip clearance flow on steam turbine flutter characteristics is therefore needed to formulate a more accurate aeroelastic stability prediction method in the design phase.Besides the tip leakage vortex, the induced vortices in the tip clearance flow can also influence blade flutter characteristics. However, the spatial distribution of the induced vortices cannot be resolved by URANS method for the limitation of turbulence models. The Detached-Eddy Simulation (DES) calculation is thus applied on a realistic-scale last stage steam turbine model to analyze the structure of induced vortices in the tip region. The influence of the tip leakage vortex and the induced vortices on flutter prediction are analyzed separately. The KTH Steam Turbine Flutter Test Case is used in the flutter analysis as a typical realistic-scale last stage steam turbine model. The energy method based on 3D unsteady CFD calculation is applied in the flutter analysis. Two CFD solvers, an in-house code LUFT and a commercial software ANSYS CFX, are used in the flutter analysis as verification of each other. The influence of tip leakage vortex on the steam turbine flutter prediction is analyzed by comparing the aeroelastic stability of two models: one with the tip gap and the other without the tip gap. Comparison between the flutter characteristics predicted by URANS and DES approaches is analyzed to investigate the influence of the induced vortices on blade flutter characteristics. The multiple induced vortices and their relative rotation around the tip leakage vortex in the KTH Steam Turbine Flutter Test Case are resolved by DES but not by URANS simulations. Both tip leakage vortex and induced vortices have an influence on blade loading on the rear half of the suction side near the blade tip. The flutter analysis results suggest that the tip clearance flow has a significant influence on blade aerodynamic damping at the least stable interblade phase angle (IBPA), while its influence on the overall shape of the damping curve is minor. At the least stable IBPA, the tip leakage vortex shows a stabilization effect on rotor aeroelastic stabilities while the induced vortices show a destabilization effect on it. Meanwhile, a non-linear unsteady flow behavior is observed due to the streamwise motion of induced vortices during blade oscillation, which phenomenon is only resolved in DES results.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2018.<br>This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.<br>Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.<br>Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-141) and index.<br>Novel commercial transport aircraft concepts feature large wing spans to increase their fuel efficiency; these wings are more flexible, leading to more potential aeroelastic problems. Furthermore, these aircraft fly in the transonic flow regime, where utter prediction is difficult. The goals for this thesis are to devise a method to reduce the computational burden of including transonic utter constraints in conceptual design tools, and to offer a potential solution for mitigating utter problems through the use of additive manufacturing techniques, specically focusing on a design methodology for lattice structures. To reduce the computational expense of considering transonic utter in conceptual aircraft design, a physics-based low-order method for transonic utter prediction is developed, which is based on small unsteady disturbances about a known steady flow solution. The states of the model are the circulation and doublet perturbations, and their evolution equation coefficients are calibrated using off-line unsteady two-dimensional flow simulations. The model is formulated for swept high-aspect ratio wings through strip theory and 3D corrections. The resulting low-order unsteady flow model is coupled to a typical-section structural model (for airfoils) or a beam model (for wings) to accurately predict utter of airfoils and wings. The method is fast enough to permit incorporation of transonic utter constraints in conceptual aircraft design calculations, as it only involves solving for the eigenvalues of small state-space systems. This model is used to describe the influence of transonic utter on next generation aircraft configurations, where it was found that transonic utter constraints can limit the eciency gains seen by better material technology. As a potential approach for mitigating utter, additively manufactured lattice structures are aeroelastically tailored to increase the flutter margin of wings. Adaptive meshing techniques are used to design the topology of the lattice to align with the load direction while adhering to manufacturing constraints, and the lattice is optimized to minimize the structural weight and to improve the flutter margin. The internal structure of a wing is aeroelastically tailored using this design strategy to increase the flutter margin, which only adds minimal weight to the structure due to the large design freedom the lattice structure offers.<br>by Max Maria Jacques Opgenoord.<br>Ph. D.

The turbomachinery related industry relies heavily on numerical tools for the design and development of modern turbomachines. In order to be competitive turbomachines ought to be highly efficient and robust. This has lead engineers to develop more aggressive designs, which often leads to lower margins of structural reliability.  One of the strongest threats to turbomachines are high cycle fatigue problems which arise from aeroelastic phenomena such as flutter. According to Kielb R. (2013) many of such problems are detected at developing testing stage. This implies that the prediction capabilities for aeroelastic phenomena are in need of further development and/or tuning. This is especially evident for unsteady flow phenomena at transonic regimes. A very important step for the improvement of unsteady aerodynamic solvers is the validation and comparison of such solvers. The present thesis concerns with the validation and comparison of a non-linear time marching (ANSYS CFX) and the GKN’s in-house linearised solvers used for flutter analysis. The former has recently implemented a new feature called Transient Blade Row TBR, which drastically reduces the simulation domain to a maximum of two blades.  In order to be included in the deign process, such tool need to be validated. In the same way, the recently launched in-house code LINNEA needs to be validated in order to be considered as a design tool. Experimental data from the aeroelastic standard configuration 4, and the FUTURE project were used for the validation purposes. The validation process showed that the solvers agreed very well between them for the standard configuration. Such agreement was less clear for the FUTURE compressor; nonetheless, the solutions still sit within the bulk of solutions provided from the different FUTURE partners. The validation showed that these tools provide with similar results as the state of the art tools from different companies. This indicates that they can be used in the design process. At the same time it was observed that there is room for improvement in the solvers, as these still present some considerable differences with the experimental results.

Although flutter analysis is a relatively old problem in aviation, it is still challenging, particularly with the advent of composite materials and requirements for high-speed light airframes. The main challenge for this problem is at the transonic flow region. The transonic flow, being non-linear, poses a great challenge over traditional linear theories which fail to predict the aerodynamic properties accurately. Aerospace has been one of the primary areas of applications to take advantage of composite materials with the aim to reduce the total mass and improve control effectiveness. This work takes advantage of CFD methods advancement as the main flow solver for non-linear governing equations. In order to investigate the dynamic behaviour of composite aircraft wings, the dynamic stiffness method (DSM) for bending-torsion composite beam is used to compute the free vibration natural modes. The main objective of this work is coupling the dynamic stiffness method (DSM) with high fidelity computational fluid dynamics models in order to predict the transonic flutter of composite aircraft wings accurately and efficiently. In addressing the main aim of this study, Euler fluid flow solvers of an open source CFD code called OpenFOAM has been coupled with elastic composite wing, represented by the free vibration modes computed by DSM. The first part of this study is devoted to investigating the free vibration characteristics of two types of aircraft, namely sailplane type and transport airliner type. Two models of each type have been analysed and contrasted, which revealed the significance of the natural modes of aircraft wings and how these modes inherently capture the essential characteristics of the system. Then to validate the CFD code, two pitching and self-sustained two degrees of freedom airfoils under different flow condition have been modelled. The results have been compared against experimental measurements and numerical data from the literature which showed good agreement for the predicted force coefficients. Finally, the model has been extended to study a complete aircraft wing. Both metallic and composite Goland wings have been investigated under a wide range of flow conditions. The composite wing has been investigated using different material coupling values to show their effect on its aeroelastic behaviour. The results showed the significant influence of the material coupling on the aeroelastic characteristics of composite wings.