22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-4.7.R1

ULTRA LIGHT WING STRUCTURE FOR HIGH ALTITUDE LONG ENDURANCE UAV

Z. Goraj (1), T. Ueda (2)
(1) Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland; (2) Tetsuhiko Ueda, National Aeronautical Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan

Keywords: airplane design, flutter

This paper presents a conceptual design of main wing, body and empennage for high altitude long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle. An arrangement of main spar, ribs, shell and strut for high aspect ratio main wing and tailplane has been proposed. A number of characteristics (stiffnesses, mass distributions, moments of inertia etc), necessary for flutter calculations, is included in this paper. The structural characteristics are computed using NASTRAN programme. The critical flutter speed for empennage has been found by means of the conventional U-G method. The Doublet- Point-Method (DPM) for non-coplanar configuration was used to compute the unsteady aerodynamic forces. Aerodynamic model of empennage includes 168 aerodynamic panels. This analysis can be treated as a starting point for further wing optimisation. The main goal is to obtain the structure lighter and aerodynamically more efficient - the feature - being very important in long endurance missions.

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