The current emphasis on increasing aeronautical efficiency is leading the way to a new class of lighter more flexible airplane materials and structures, which unfortunately can result in aeroelastic instabilities. To effectively control the wings deformation and shape, appropriate modeling is necessary. Wings are often modeled as cantilever beams using finite element analysis. The drawback of t...

Biological systems have been an infinite reservoir of inspiration ever since humans started to develop tools and machinery. Just as early scientists and engineers attempted to mimic birds and fish in the development of flying machines and submarines, today, new technologies find their inspiration from biology, such as gecko feet (1), antireflective eye lenses (2), iridescent insects (3), and wa...

The paper presents a Galerkin approach for the solution of the nonlinear beam equations. Nonlinear beam analysis is required when analyzing helicopter blades or high-aspect-ratio wings. The present analysis improves on earlier solution techniques based on nonlinear finite element approach used in Refs. 1 and 2, and is the ideal choice for beam-like structures undergoing large motion. Furthermor...

A high performance finite element analysis software tool has been developed for high fidelity deformation analysis of aeroelastic tailored wings and blades made of anisotropic composite materials. The package comprises an in-line semiautomatic adaptive mesh generator and a finite element solver. An aerodynamic solver can be plugged into the package to perform a coupled aero-structure analysis. ...

A linear strength, Galerkin Boundary Element Method (BEM) for the solution of the three dimensional, direct potential boundary integral equation is presented. The method incorporates node based linear shape functions of the single and double layers on °at triangular elements. The BEM solution is accelerated using a precorrected Fast Fourier Transform algorithm (pFFT) [1]. Due to the extended co...

Due to their small size and flight regime, coupling of aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and flight dynamics is critical for Micro Aerial Vehicles. This paper presents a computational framework for simulating structural models of varied fidelity and a Navier-Stokes solver, aimed at simulating flapping and flexible wings. The structural model utilizes either (i) the in-house developed UM/NLABS,...