Nonlinear sloshing integrated aeroelastic analyses of a research wing prototype

A thorough understanding of the effects of sloshing on aircraft dynamic loads is of great importance for the future design of flexible aircraft to be able to reduce their structural mass and environmental impact. Indeed, the high vertical accelerations caused by the vibrations of the structure can lead to the fragmentation of the fuel free surface. Fluid impacts on the tank roof are potentially a new source of damping for the structure that has hardly been considered before when computing the dynamic loads of the wings. This work aims at applying recently developed reduced-order models of sloshing to the case of a prototype research wing to investigate their effects on the wing's response under pre-critical and post-critical conditions. In detail, the vertical sloshing dynamics is considered using neural networks trained with experimental data from a scaled tank and then integrated into the aeroelastic system following a suitable scaling procedure. The results concerning the damping performance under pre-critical conditions as well as the limit cycle oscillation caused by the sloshing, the only nonlinear phenomenon modeled in the present simulation framework, are presented in the paper.