Results of an Aeroelastically Tailored Wing on the FLEXOP Demonstrator Aircraft

The idea of the EU funded FLEXOP project is to raise efficiency of a currently existing wing by derivative solution with higher aspect ratio at no excess structural weight. In order to enable such a resulting highly flexible wing the project goal is to develop methods for active suppression of flutter and passive load alleviation. The developed methods will be tested and validated with a UAV flutter demonstrator. The demonstrator is a 7m wingspan, 65kg MTOW UAV equipped with a jet engine. It features three different wing pairs. The first wing is a stiff design reference case, which is flown to get the baseline measurements for comparison. The second one is a wing designed very flexible specifically for active flutter control. The third wing is aeroelastically tailored for gust load alleviation. The paper describes the results of the aeroelastically tailored wing compared to the baseline reference wing.