Aerothermoelastic stability of composite aerovehicle wings subjected to heat inputs

In this paper, a coupled aerothermoelastic dynamic stability analysis of composite aerovehicle wings featuring nonclassical effects, and immersed in an incompressible gas flow is developed. Specifically, the study concerns the aerothermoelastic stability of swept wings made of advanced composite materials and exposed to a heat flow generated by a laser beam impacting its deformed surface. Because of its exceptional features in thermal insulation of aerospace structures, the pyrolytic graphite is adopted in the actual numerical simulations together with consideration of a rectangular single-layered swept wing. The evaluation of the temperature field on the deformed (actual) configuration of the wing permits the authors 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 it, the static and dynamic aeroelastic instabilities are determined. The obtained results indicate that the aeroelastic stability is substantially affected by the thermoelastic 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.