Collaborative Pazy Wing Analyses for the Third Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop

Abstract

In this paper, collaborative aeroelastic analyses of the \textit{Pazy Wing} are presented, which support the activities of the Large Deflection Working Group, a sub-group of the 3rd Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop (AePW3). The Pazy Wing is a benchmark for the investigation of nonlinear aeroelastic effects at very large structural deflections. Tip deformations on the order of 50% semi-span were measured in wind tunnel tests at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. This feature renders the model highly attractive for the validation of numerical aeroelastic methods for geometrically nonlinear, large deflection analyses. A distinguishing feature of the Pazy Wing is that its flutter speed is a function of the static deformation, and capturing this effect requires a nonlinear aeroelastic framework which allows for stability (flutter) analyses about steady states of large deformations. In particular, the flutter characteristics of the model are dominated by a hump mode which develops due to the coupling of the first torsion and the second out-of-plane bending mode; this hump mode moves towards lower airspeeds as the steady structural deformation increases. Different nonlinear aeroelastic solvers were applied by the authors to obtain static coupling and flutter results for a series of airspeeds and angles of attack. The results reveal that the decisive nonlinear effects were captured very well by the applied methods and computational tools.