Section: Application Domains

Aeronautics

Improved safety and performance and reduced aircraft development and operating costs are major concerns in aeronautics industry. One critical design objective is to clear the aircraft from unstable aero-elastic vibrations (flutter) in all flight conditions. Opening of flight domain requires a careful exploration of the dynamical behavior of the structure subject to vibration and aero-servo-elastic forces. This is achieved via a combination of ground vibration tests and in flight tests. For both types of tests, various sensors data are recorded, and modal analyses are performed. Important challenges of the in-flight modal analyses are the limited choices for measured excitation inputs, and the presence of unmeasured natural excitation inputs (turbulence). Today, structural flight tests require controlled excitation by ailerons or other devices, stationary flight conditions (constant elevation and speed), and no turbulence. As a consequence, flight domain opening requires a lot of test flights and its costly. This is even worse for aircrafts having a large number of variants (business jets, military aircrafts). A key challenge is therefore to allow for exploiting more data under more conditions during flight tests: uncontrolled excitation, nonstationary conditions.