An aeroelastic flapping analysis is integrated with a commercial, gradient-based optimizer within a computational framework. The aeroelastic analysis couples a geometrically-nonlinear beam formulation with a quasi-steady blade element aerodynamics tool and trigonometric flapping kinematics. Analytic gradient information is produced for peak power required, cycle-averaged lift, and maximum von Mises stress with respect to element chord and thickness and nine kinematic parameters, alleviating the burden of finite-difference gradients. The chord and thickness distributions and kinematics were simultaneously optimized to provide a wing requiring minimum flapping power under constraints on lift and stress. Three optimized designs are presented, yielding more than 70% reduction in peak power requirement from baseline designs, and 28% reduction from a design produced by another optimization method. This work concludes with an experimental validation of the aeroelastic tool through the comparison of various static, dynamic, and flapping metrics.
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