Browsing by Author "Preidikman, Sergio"

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    A Coupled Tire Structure-Acoustic Cavity Model
    Molisani, Leonardo Rafael (Virginia Tech, 2004-05-20)
    Recent experimental results have shown that the vibration induced by the tire air cavity resonance is transmitted into the vehicle cabin and may be responsible for significant interior noise. The tire acoustic cavity is excited by the road surface through the contact patch on the rotating tire. The effect of the cavity resonance is that results in significant forces developed at the vehicle's spindle, which in turn drives the vehicle's interior acoustic field. This tire-cavity interaction phenomenon is analytically investigated by modeling the fully coupled tire-cavity systems. The tire is modeled as an annular shell structure in contact with the road surface. The rotating contact patch is used as a forcing function in the coupled tire-cavity governing equation of motion. The contact patch is defined as a prescribed deformation that in turn is expanded in its Fourier components. The response of the tire is then separated into static (i.e. static deformation induced by the contact patch) and dynamic components due to inertial effects. The coupled system of equations is solved analytically in order to obtain the tire acoustic and structural responses. The model provides valuable physical insight into the patch-tire-acoustic interaction phenomenon. The influence of the acoustic cavity resonance on the spindles forces is shown to be very important. Therefore, the tire cavity resonance effect must be reduced in order to control the tire contribution to the vehicle interior. The analysis and modeling of two feasible approaches to control the tire acoustic cavity resonances are proposed and investigated. The first approach is the incorporation of secondary acoustic cavities to detune and damp out the main tire cavity resonance. The second approach is the addition of damping directly into the tire cavity. The techniques presented in this dissertation to suppress the adverse effects of the acoustic cavity in the tire response, i.e. forces at the spindle, show to be very effective and can be easily applied in practice.
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    Numerical Simulations of Interactions Among Aerodynamics, Structural Dynamics, and Control Systems
    Preidikman, Sergio (Virginia Tech, 1998-10-01)
    A robust technique for performing numerical simulations of nonlinear unsteady aeroelastic behavior is developed. The technique is applied to long-span bridges and the wing of a modern business jet. The heart of the procedure is combining the aerodynamic and structural models. The aerodynamic model is a general unsteady vortex-lattice method. The structural model for the bridges is a rigid roadbed supported by linear and torsional springs. For the aircraft wing, the structural model is a cantilever beam with rigid masses attached at various positions along the span; it was generated with the NASTRAN program. The structure, flowing air, and control devices are considered to be the elements of a single dynamic system. All the governing equations are integrated simultaneously and interactively in the time domain; a predictor-corrector method was adapted to perform this integration. For long-span bridges, the simulation predicts the onset of flutter accurately, and the numerical results strongly suggest that an actively controlled wing attached below the roadbed can easily suppress the wind-excited oscillations. The governing equations for a proposed passive system were developed. The wing structure is modelled with finite elements. The deflections are expressed as an expansion in terms of the free-vibration modes. The time-dependent coefficients are the generalized coordinates of the entire dynamic system. The concept of virtual work was extended to develop a method to transfer the aerodynamic loads to the structural nodes. Depending on the speed of the aircraft, the numerical results show damped responses to initial disturbances (although there are no viscous terms in either the aerodynamic or structural model), merging of modal frequencies, the development of limit-cycle oscillations, and the occurrence of a supercritical Hopf bifurcation leading to motion on a torus.
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    Time-Domain Simulations of Aerodynamic Forces on Three-Dimensional Configurations, Unstable Aeroelastic Responses, and Control by Neural Network Systems
    Wang, Zhicun (Virginia Tech, 2004-05-06)
    The nonlinear interactions between aerodynamic forces and wing structures are numerically investigated as integrated dynamic systems, including structural models, aerodynamics, and control systems, in the time domain. An elastic beam model coupled with rigid-body rotation is developed for the wing structure, and the natural frequencies and mode shapes are found by the finite-element method. A general unsteady vortex-lattice method is used to provide aerodynamic forces. This method is verified by comparing the numerical solutions with the experimental results for several cases; and thereafter applied to several applications such as the inboard-wing/twin-fuselage configuration, and formation flights. The original thought that the twin fuselage could achieve two-dimensional flow on the wing by eliminating free wing tips appears to be incorrect. The numerical results show that there can be a lift increase when two or more wings fly together, compared to when they fly alone. Flutter analysis is carried out for a High-Altitude-Long-Endurance aircraft wing cantilevered from the wall of the wind tunnel, a full-span wing mounted on a free-to-roll sting at its mid-span without and with a center mass (fuselage). Numerical solutions show that the rigidity added by the wall results in a higher flutter speed for the wall-mounted semi-model than that for the full-span model. In addition, a predictive control technique based on neural networks is investigated to suppress flutter oscillations. The controller uses a neural network model to predict future plant responses to potential control signals. A search algorithm is used to select the best control input that optimizes future plant performance. The control force is assumed to be given by an actuator that can apply a distributed torque along the spanwise direction of the wing. The solutions with the wing-tip twist or the wing-tip deflection as the plant output show that the flutter oscillations are successfully suppressed with the neural network predictive control scheme.