Aeroelasticity of Flexible Airfoils with Arbitrary Camber Deformations

摘要

In the paper, an aeroelastic formulation is developed to analyze flexible airfoils with arbitrary camber deformations. Free-free bending-type of deformations of flexible airfoils, described by using the orthogonal Legendre polynomials, are considered in addition to the traditional rigid-body plunging and pitching motions. The complete set of equations of motion is derived by following the Hamilton's Principle. In addition, a 2-D finite-state unsteady aerodynamic formulation with arbitrary airfoil deformations is applied to find the aerodynamic loads of the flexible airfoils with the rigid-body motions. The coupled aeroelastic equations allow for the study of the camber effects on dynamic aeroelastic behaviors of flexible airfoils. Numerical studies in this paper validate the developed aerodynamic and aeroelastic formulations of airfoils with arbitrary camber deformations, by comparing to other published software. Finally, the impact of the camber flexibility on the static and dynamic aeroelastic characteristics of flexible airfoils is explored in the paper.