Nonlinear Aeroelastic Simulations and Stability Analysis of the Pazy Wing Aeroelastic Benchmark

The Pazy wing aeroelastic benchmark is a highly flexible wind tunnel model investigated in the Large Deflection Working Group as part of the Third Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop. Due to the design of the model, very large elastic deformations in the order of 50% span are generated at highest dynamic pressures and angles of attack in the wind tunnel. This paper presents static coupling simulations and stability analyses for selected onflow velocities and angles of attack. Therefore, an aeroelastic solver developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is used for static coupling simulations, which couples a vortex lattice method with the commercial finite element solver MSC Nastran. For the stability analysis, a linearised aerodynamic model is derived analytically from the unsteady vortex lattice method and integrated with a modal structural model into a monolithic aeroelastic discrete-time state-space model. The aeroelastic stability is then determined by calculating the eigenvalues of the system’s dynamics matrix. It is shown that the stability of the wing in terms of flutter changes significantly with increasing deflection and is heavily influenced by the change in modal properties, i.e., structural eigenvalues and eigenvectors.