Aeroelasticity

Flutter With Unsteady

Aero
Darin Haudrich
Darin.p.haudrich@boeing.com
4/8/2015

Background
We previously went through a 2-DOF rigid

airfoil example and home with steady

aerodynamics. We will now look at the use of
unsteady aerodynamics in the flutter
equations.

2DOF Airfoil

Rigid Airfoil
P reference point
C Center of Mass
Q Aerodynamic center
T chord point
b chord
e and a go from -1 to 1
X = e-a

EOM
EOMs:
Assume harmonic motion:
Substituting into EOMs above:
Where lift and moment are:
Substituting lift and moment in:

Flutter Formulation
Since the EOM are linear and homogenous the

determinant must be zero for a nontrivial

solution.

How to solve
1)Specify an altitude to fix
2)Specify M
3)Specify K values, start with 0.001 to 1.0
4)At each k, M calculate lh, l, mh, m

Flutter Formulation
How to Solve continued
5)Solve the flutter determinant which is a quadratic
equation with complex values for (/) 2 that
correspond to each of the selected values of k.
6)Interpolate to find the value of k at which the
imaginary part of the one of the roots becomes zero.
This can be done graphically as well
7)Determine U = b/k and M=U/c
Repeat 3-7 with the value of M obtained in step 7 until
Min =Mout and then that is the correct flutter speed.
Repeat process at different values of to determine
flutter as a function of altitude.

K-method
EOMs:
Where D=

Nondimensionalizing:
g is equivalent structural damping
Z the unknown is formulated as:

K-Method
Flutter determinant:
Frequency and Damping from the solution comes from

eigenvalue of Z:
Where g = 0 is flutter.
The damping value g is an artificial value of structural

damping to achieve simple harmonic motion at a

frequency i
The k-method is easy to implement but inherently is a
mathematically improper formulation. The only place
this method is valid is g=0.

P-k method
The p-k method tries to overcome some the

mathematical issues that the k-method introduces.

We start by creating a dimensionless time
EOM becomes:
M and are diagonal matrices and:
For a given speed and altitude the flutter

determinant is solve for n+1 p values

where k is the reduced frequency and is log dec
dam

P-k method
If the aerodynamics are a function of k:
The results have to be iterated on such the k

value for the aero is adjusted to match the

value from the system eigenvalue for each
eigenvalue for each velocity chosen.

Comparison plots

Summary
g=0 results are the same for each method.
At the same velocity, a mode can have two

frequencies???
the instability can become more unstable as
speed decreases???

NASTRAN K-Method

NASTRAN K-Method

NASTRAN K-Method