AeroFlex is an academic toolbox for studying the flight dynamics of highly flexible airplanes.
Most part of development was done during my master thesis, at ITA, under the supervision of Prof. Pedro Paglione and Prof. Roberto Gil. Several contributions come from the work of Marcelo S. de Sousa during his PhD at ITA.
This tool uses the mathematical development from the PhD theses of Eric Brown (MIT, 2003), Christopher Shearer (Harvard, 2006) and Weihua Su (University of Michigan, 2008).
The structural dynamics of the airplane is modeled using a strain-based geometrically non-linear beam. For aerodynamic calculations, the strip theory is used including three modeling approaches: a quasi-steady, quasi-steady with apparent mass and full unsteady aerodynamics representations.
Several applications can be studied using this tool:
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Simulation and stability analysis of classic wing aeroelastic phenomena like: divergence, flutter, control reversals;
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Simulation and stability analysis of nonlinear wing aeroelastic phenomena, due to nonlinear geometry deflections;
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Simulation and stability analysis of a flexible aircraft in free-flight condition.
If you want to try AeroFlex, you can download the ZIP file with the last version here. Then, play with the examples files in the '.\examples' folder. If you want to contribute, I strongly suggest that you fork this repository and submit pull requests with your contributions.
My goal is to include several examples and tutorials of use of this tool, with the hope that it can be used by other people. I am still working on it. You can check some of them here.
All main files are in the ./main/ folder. These files are used to perform all the tasks: from
defining each component of the airplane (wings, engines, rigid units attached to the body)
to perform simulations. You can have a better idea of how AeroFlex work by reading
this paper.
Here you can find some references that used AeroFlex for studying the flight dynamics and control of highly flexible airplanes.
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Cardoso-Ribeiro, F.L., Paglione, P., da Silva, R.G.A., de Sousa, M.S. AeroFlex: A toolbox for studying the flight dynamics of highly flexible airplanes. CONEM 2012.
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Cardoso-Ribeiro, F.L., Paglione, P., da Silva, R.G.A. Stability analysis of a highly flexible airplane. CONEM 2012.
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Cardoso-Ribeiro, F.L. Dinâmica de voo de aeronaves muito flexíveis, Master thesis, ITA, 2011.
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de Sousa, M.S., Modelagem, simulação e controle não linear de aviões muito flexíveis, Doctorate thesis, ITA, 2013.
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de Sousa, M.S., Paglione, P., Cardoso-Ribeiro, F.L., da Silva, R.G.A., Use of Universal Integral Regulator to Control the Flight Dynamics of Flexible Airplanes, COBEM 2013.
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de Sousa, M.S., Paglione, P., da Silva, R.G.A., Cardoso-Ribeiro, F.L., Cunha Jr., S.S. Mathematical model of one flexible transport category aircraft. In: Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology. Accepted for publication (2016).
All components are licensed under the BSD 2-Clause license.