Methodologies for reproducing in-flight loads of aircraft wings on the ground and predicting their response to battle-induced damage

Survivability of an aircraft in combat is achieved by not getting hit or by withstanding the effects of some suffered hits. Combat damage is described by the removal of one or more portions of the wing or any other flight control surface. To determine whether a wing will survive a specific damage, the structural and aerodynamic response of the wing should be predicted and tested. The response of wings to battle-induced damage is currently addressed through live-fire testing on the ground. The loading methodology used in these live-fire tests does not reproduce the loads encountered during flight, and does not account for the changes in structural stiffness and mass of the wing after damage infliction. In addition, current live-fire tests fail to address the changes in the aerodynamic performance of the wing caused by the battle-induced damage.; To better address the structural response of aircraft wings to combat damage, this thesis investigates a concept for an alternative loading methodology that exploits recent advances in nonlinear aeroelastic simulations and smart material actuators. The main idea behind this concept is to accurately predict the stress states of the wing before, during, and after sustaining a hit, for a given flight condition, and reproduce them on the ground by loading the spars and ribs of the wings with programmable actuators and/or a few external tethers. Mathematically, this entails solving an optimization problem to determine the locations and gains of the actuators. Two different types of actuators are investigated: 1D actuators or actuators with tension/compression capability and bimorph bender actuators. The potential of the investigated loading methodology is evaluated for "slender" wings (ARW-2 wing) and for "delta" wings (HSCT and F-16 wing) at a transonic flight condition. The obtained numerical results suggest that the investigated loading methodology can reproduce a desired stress state fairly accurately using external tethers with no other means of actuation.; This thesis also predicts the aerodynamic response of aircraft wings to simulated battle damage, using numerical aerodynamic simulations. The damage is represented by a circular hole in the computational fluid dynamics model of a clean F-16 wing. The effects of changing the size, location and shape of the hole as well as the angle of attack on the lift and drag of the wing are predicted. The obtained numerical results indicate that the lift decreases and the drag increases with increasing the size of the hole and/or the angle of attack.