Modeling of airfoil aeroelastic response to gust and rain coupled loads

The aeroelastic response of an airfoil featuring plunging-pitching coupled motion in an incompressible flow field to gust and rain coupled loads is primarily investigated in this paper. The equations of airfoil coupled motion are derived by the “typical section” approach and the aeroelastic model is achieved by coupling these to 2D unsteady aerodynamics models for incompressible potential flows. The modelings of the unsteady aerodynamic and gust loads are established by the use of the Wagner’s and the Küssner’s functions, respectively. The incorporation of the rain effect is implemented via substituting the values of the slope of lift curve in the rain conditions in the aeroelastic response equations. Numerical modelings of the aeroelastic response to gusts of different velocity distributions and comparisons with the solution obtained for the rigid and elastic models featuring plunging or pitching motion alone and plunging-pitching coupled motion are provided. The pertinent results agree well with the results from other literature. The influences of gust, rain and airfoil control parameters are specially presented and discussed in detail. These results seem new and should have important reference value to the optimization of aircraft structure for the industrial aviation community.