Aeroelastic response of composite aircraft swept wings impacted by a laser beam

A closed form solution for the aeroelastic response of an aircraft swept wing made of advanced composite materials and exposed to a time-dependent thermal field is presented. The thermal field is supposed to be generated by a laser beam impacting the upper surface of the wing, and, within this context, an uncoupled thermo-elastic model is adopted. The wing structure is modeled as a plate-like body with appropriate internal constraints (in the sense that no thickness extension is permitted into the model) and including warping effects. Although considered in a linearized context, the structural model of the wing incorporates the transverse shear effects, the anisotropy of the constituent materials, as well as the sweep angle. It is supposed that the wing is immersed in a subsonic incompressible flow whose speed is below the flutter critical speed of the system. The solution of the problem has been obtained analytically in a double Laplace transform domain, where both the space and time co-ordinates are converted to their Laplace variable space counterparts. Within this approach, the problem is reduced to the solution of an algebraic problem in the transformed kinematical unknowns. Although this paper is confined to the study of the dynamic aeroelastic response in the subcritical flight speed regime, the approach of the dynamic response in the time domain provides important information on the occurrence of the flutter instability when the wing is exposed to a time-varying thermal field. Copyright © 2004 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.