Estudio en estado estático de aeroelasticidad para la estructura de una aeronave no tripulada (UAV) de tipo “fuselaje integrado” (BWB) mediante métodos numéricos

Abstract

In the present work, the static aeroelasticity phenomena was investigated for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) – blended wing body “BWB” through numerical methods implemented in PYTHON programming language. This assignment corresponds to a preliminary design stage and focuses on the displacements over the wing to decrease structural damage over the aircraft. An aerodynamic and structural modules were using to proposed a methodology based on Vortex Lattice Method and Euler – Bernoulli beam theory. The aforementioned methodology was applied to describe the aerodynamics forces and displacements above the structure of an aerial planform. Results were contrasted with open access information and differences are less than 13 %. Comparison of models showed that the proposed method reproduced the static aeroelasticity problem with good results. Subsequently, a case study through parametric assessment was developed to measure structural displacements carried out by changing operating conditions and geometric parameters. The main features of the assessment were: attack angle, sweep angle, altitude, airfoil and materials. Results achieved were used to stablish an optimal operating range in order to define the preliminary design field.