Davide Balatti, Hamed Haddad Khodaparast, Shakir Jiffri, Michael Friswell, Sebastiano Fichera, Alessandra Vizzaccaro, Andrea Castrichini
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: IFASD-2024-033
Aeronautical structures, due to uncertainties and nonlinearities, require extensive experimental testing for both design and certification, especially concerning their aeroelastic
behaviour. Such experimental procedures are conducted through both wind tunnel tests and flying prototypes. The latter introduces risks to personnel, entails higher costs, and provides considerably less control over external factors. At the same time, wind tunnel tests offer safety, affordability, repeatability, and control over external variables. However, due to the limitations of the wind tunnel test section, only scaled models or limited portions of the whole structure can be tested, resulting in a lack of interaction with surrounding aero-structural systems. Hybrid Testing (HT) is an advanced experimental technique in structural engineering that combines physical testing with numerical simulations to assess the behaviour of complex structures and systems under various loading conditions. In HT, the structure of interest is divided into physical and numerical substructures and then combined to form a hybrid structure reproducing the behavior of the original system. In the existing literature, HT has been primarily applied to academic simplified aeroelastic systems. This work aims to evaluate the feasibility of HT for aeroelastic industrial applications, considering a more realistic model. To this end, an aeroelastic straight untapered half-wing is examined. In this work, both virtual and physical substructures are simulated. A transfer system ensures force and displacement compatibility between the numerical and physical substructures through a control system employing sensors and actuators at the interface. Time delay and bandwidth limitations associated with the transfer system
are modelled and investigated.