Aerothermoelastic Response of a Functionally-Graded Aircraft Wing to Heat oads

In this paper, a coupled aerothermoelastic dynamic stability analysis of a functionally-graded composite wing featuring non-classical effects, and immersed in an incompressible gas flow is developed. Specifically, the study concerns the aerothermoelastic stability of aircraft swept wing made of advanced functionally-graded composite materials and exposed to a heat flow generated by a laser beam impacting its deformed surface. The structural model is specialized in the computations to the case of a rectangular, single-layered, swept wing made of functionally graded material (FGM) with a ceramic-metallic-ceramic phase gradient. In particular, aluminun and alumina have been chosen as metallic and ceramic phases respectively. The evaluation of the temperature field on the deformed (actual) configuration of the wing permits to address the problems of the aerothermoelastic response and stability in a coupled framework. As a result, the exact analytical expression of the aerothermoelastic response of the heated wing is obtained in the Laplace space domain and, following this, the static and dynamic aeroelastic instabilities of the wing model are determined. The obtained results indicate that the aeroelastic stability is substantially affected by the thermo-elastic coupling and that the presence of FGM can also significantly influence the aerothermoelastic behavior. Copyright © 2008 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.