Vibration and Aeroelasticity of Advanced Aircraft Wings Modeled as Thin-Walled Beams--Dynamics, Stability and Control

Based on a refined analytical anisotropic thin-walled beam model, aeroelastic instability, dynamic aeroelastic response, active/passive aeroelastic control of advanced aircraft wings modeled as thin-walled beams are systematically addressed. The refined thin-walled beam model is based on an existing framework of the thin-walled beam model and a couple of non-classical effects that are usually also important are incorporated and the model herein developed is validated against the available experimental, Finite Element Anaylsis (FEA), Dynamic Finite Element (DFE), and other analytical predictions. The concept of indicial functions is used to develop unsteady aerodynamic model, which broadly encompasses the cases of incompressible, compressible subsonic, compressible supersonic and hypersonic flows. State-space conversion of the indicial function based unsteady aerodynamic model is also developed. Based on the piezoelectric material technology, a worst case control strategy based on the minimax theory towards the control of aeroelastic systems is further developed. Shunt damping within the aeroelastic tailoring environment is also investigated. The major part of this dissertation is organized in the form of self-contained chapters, each of which corresponds to a paper that has been or will be submitted to a journal for publication. In order to fullfil the requirement of having a continuous presentation of the topics, each chapter starts with the purely structural models and is gradually integrated with the involved interactive field disciplines.