Aeroelastic analyses of the free flight of the active aeroelastic aircraft testbed (A3tb) platform

This paper describes the aeroelastic analyses intended and the ones performed on the Active Aeroelastic Aircraft Testbed (A3TB), a low-cost design, flexible platform for aeroelastic research and technology demonstration developed at Technion Israel Institute of Technology. The aircraft is a 3D-printed, flying-wing configuration designed to be a modular experimental research platform, to demonstrate static and dynamic aeroelastic shape control that targets performance and stability goals. This aircraft contains basic features that are encountered in blended wing-body vehicles of the type of interest for precision agriculture. This is part of a collaborative effort between Technion and the University of Michigan on the study of UAVs capable of large-area coverage for crop monitoring. The studies detailed in this paper focuses on methods and solutions to evaluate the flutter behavior of such configurations and the potential impact on the flutter instability due to property fluctuations during the design and/or operations.