Appl. Math. Mech. -Engl. Ed.

, 39(2), 241–260 (2018)

Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (English Edition)

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10483-018-2297-6

Vibration characteristics and flutter analysis of a composite

laminated plate with a store∗

Huagang LIN, Dengqing CAO† , Yuqian XU

School of Astronautics, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
(Received May 15, 2017 / Revised Aug. 1, 2017)

Abstract The effects of an external store on the flutter characteristics of a compos-

ite laminated plate in a supersonic flow are investigated. The Dirac function is used to
formulate the interaction between the plate and the store. The first-order piston theory
is used to describe the aerodynamic load. The governing equation of the composite lam-
inated plate with an external store is established based on the Hamilton principle. The
mode shapes are constructed by the admissible functions which are a set of characteristic
orthogonal polynomials generated directly by the Gram-Schmidt process, and the bound-
ary constraint is modeled as the artificial springs. The frequency and mode shapes of the
plate under different boundaries are determined by the Rayleigh-Ritz method. The valid-
ity of the proposed approach is confirmed by comparing the results with those obtained
from the finite element method (FEM). The effects of the mounting position, the center
of gravity position and the mounting points spacing of the external store on the flutter
boundary are discussed for both the simply supported and cantilever plates, respectively,
which correspond to the two installation sites of the external store, i.e., the belly and
wings of the aircraft.
Key words composite laminated plate, Gram-Schmidt orthogonal polynomial, artificial
spring, Rayleigh-Ritz method, flutter boundary
Chinese Library Classification O321
2010 Mathematics Subject Classification 74H45

1 Introduction
Military aircrafts usually carry external missiles, fuel tanks, and other objects in the fuselage
or wings. The flutter problem of wings and plates is an important part in the process of the
aeroelastic design of a aircraft. At present, the location of a store for aircrafts is mainly
distributed at two positions, wings and belly parts. The trends of aircraft design are leading to
the placement of heavy lumped mass on the panels of the wings or the fuselage. The installation
of the store tends to change the vibration characteristics and flutter boundary of the structures.
In aircraft design, the plate of the belly is usually connected by riveting and regarded as the
simply supported boundary, and the wing or control surface can be regarded as a cantilever
plate.

∗ Citation: Lin, H. G., Cao, D. Q., and Xu, Y. Q. Vibration characteristics and flutter analysis of
a composite laminated plate with a store. Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (English Edition),
39(2), 241–260 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1007/s10483-018-2297-6
† Corresponding author, E-mail: dqcao@hit.edu.cn
Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11472089)
Shanghai
c University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
242 Huagang LIN, Dengqing CAO, and Yuqian XU

For the research about the wings with an external store, e.g., masses, missile, and tank,
Tang et al.[1] studied a combination system of a delta plate with a store, where the flutter
velocity was sensitive to the store span location and store attachment stiffness. Fazelzadeh
et al.[2] investigated the static and dynamic aeroelastic stability of a cantilever wing/store
system. Mazidi et al.[3] considered the aeroelastic response of a wing with an engine subjected
to time-dependent thrust excitations. Firouz-Abadi et al.[4] studied the aeroelastic instability
of a wing with a fuel tank store. Lei and Ye[5] simulated the process of store separation with
the wing deformation numerically. Gern[6] and Golparvar et al.[7] investigated the vibration
characteristics of a wing with a store and the effects of different parameters such as the weights,
the inertia of stores, and the thickness and store center of gravity on the flutter. Runyan and
Sewall[8] showed the effect of the concentrated weights in a wing model at various positions
on the flutter characteristics. The aforementioned studies show the effects of the store on the
flutter behavior, but they often focus on the subsonic aerodynamic stability of the wing plate.
With the increase in the speed of an aircraft, it is necessary to pursue an approach to study
the flutter problem of both the wings and the plates in a supersonic flow. Since more and
more composite laminated structures are used in real aircrafts, it is important to carry out
research on the flutter characteristics of composite laminated plates with external stores in the
supersonic regions.
For the flutter problem of plates and shells, theoretical results have provided a good un-
derstanding. However, the studies about the flutter characteristics of plates with complex
boundaries or elastic supports are rare. Dowell and Weiliang[9] investigated the flutter problem
of a cantilever isotropic plate with a Rayleigh-Ritz approach, and showed that the length-to-
width ratio of the plate had a significant effect on the flutter boundary. Kouchakzadeh et al.[10]
studied the aeroelasticity problem of the laminated composite panel in a supersonic airflow with
a simply supported boundary with the Galerkin method. Pourtakdoust and Fazelzadeh[11] in-
vestigated the chaotic behavior of the nonlinear viscoelastic plate in a supersonic region with a
Galerkin approach. Singha and Ganapathi[12] , Kuo[13] , and Marques et al.[14] investigated the
flutter behavior of composite plates in the supersonic flow with a linear piston theory through
the finite element method (FEM). However, there are difficulties in the mode shape construc-
tion for the structure with a complex boundary due to the lack of a precise analytical mode
function.
For complex boundaries, Bhat[15] used the Gram-Schmidt process to generate the orthog-
onal polynomials so as to solve the natural frequency of the rectangular plates with various
boundaries, and obtained superior results for lower modes. Amabili and Garziera[16] used the
artificial springs to investigate the vibration problems of the cylindrical shells with complex
boundary constraints, where the mode of the less-restrained condition was used to expand the
solutions of displacement. The distributions of spring stiffness were systematically represented
by the cosine series. Jin et al.[17] studied the free vibration of composite laminated shells under
general elastic boundary with the Rayleigh-Ritz procedure, expressed the displacements by a
Fourier cosine series, and illustrated the effects of boundary restraining stiffness on frequency.
Mahi et al.[18] investigated the free vibration of different kinds of composite panels with differ-
ent boundaries by use of a series of characteristic orthogonal polynomials. Zhang and Li[19] and
Wang et al.[20] solved the vibration problem of rectangular plates with elastic edge restraints,
where the translational and rotational restraints were arbitrarily applied to an edge and their
stiffness distributions were described by a set of cosine functions. Li and Narita[21] studied the
critical aerodynamic pressure for different types of laminated plates with general boundary con-
ditions with the consideration of the thermal effects. The modes of plates or shells with elastic
support are rarely used to solve the complicated problems such as the analysis of response or
flutter. In this paper, artificial springs are used to solve the flutter boundary of the simply
supported and cantilever plates, respectively.
We use the Dirac function to describe the interaction between the plate and store, and es-