Aeroelastic Tailoring, Composites, and Progress Towards Validation

Composite materials, due to their anisotropic stiffness, offer an improved potential for aeroelastic tailoring over isotropic material, e.g. metallic fan blades. This is because the anisotropy enlarges the degrees of freedom available. The presentation will show examples for using the orientation of the fibers in the composite, i.e. the lay-ups, for aeroelastic tailoring. It will also show progress towards the development of a digital image correlation technique for future experimental validation of experiments in aeroelastic tailoring.