Application of Ground Flutter Emulation Test Technique for the Passive Flutter Suppression Effect Validation

The newly proposed ground test technique for aeroelastic flutter emulation is applied to examine the effectiveness of passive flutter suppression. The technique is to substitute wind-tunnel flutter test by emulating unsteady aerodynamic force using several point-loading actuators. Besides the simplicity of the technique, the essential advantage of applying it to the flutter test is that it has unlimited airspeed range, provided that the proper aerodynamic model and actuators are available. Since all the previous works on the emulated flutter test has been performed for the rectangular plate wings, an example of passive flutter suppression design for the swept-back plate structure model is studied, in this paper. The delay of the flutter onset due to the structural modification is analytically and experimentally observed using typical methods, namely root-locus and wind-tunnel test. The flutter emulation test technique is also applied to the same structure. The results show that the flutter emulation technique is capable of validating the flutter suppression effect. The close correlation of the flutter test results obtained by the emulated flutter test and the other two conventional methods suggests an alternative experimental validation of flutter suppression design.