Aerothermoelastic stability of composite aircraft wings subjected to heat inputs

In this paper, a coupled aerothermoelastic dynamic stability analysis of composite aircraft wings featuring non-classical effects, and immersed in an incompressible gas flow is developed. Specifically, the study concerns the aerothermoelastic stability of aircraft swept wings made of advanced 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 composed of a transversely Isotropie material. Due to its exceptional features in thermal insulation of aerospace structures, the pyrolytic graphite is adopted in the actual numerical simulations. 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. In the presentation and discussion of the results, special attention is given to the effects played by the flight speed, thermal anisotropy of the material constituent, ratio of the characteristic thermal time to the natural period of vibration, and direction of the external heat flux impacting the wing surface. Copyright © 2006 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.