MEMS SEMINAR: “My Adventures with Flexible and Very Flexible Wings”

Abstract: Flight vehicles are becoming increasingly more flexible. This is the case for transport aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and even missiles. Such designs are inherently flexible and susceptible to adverse aeroelastic phenomena, such as excessive response to atmospheric turbulence and flutter instability. Some very flexible configurations bring new challenges as the traditional structural and aeroelastic models are inadequate to describe their behavior. In the Aeroelasticity Laboratory at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, we derive novel computational and experimental approaches to study very flexible wings and test methodologies to assess their characteristics in flight. The talk will introduce some of our recent aeroelastic studies, including a wind tunnel test of an extremely flexible wing that deforms to 50% of its span under aerodynamic loads and the Active Aeroelastic Aircraft Testbed (A3TB), a 3D-printed experimental vehicle for flutter suppression studies.
Professor Daniella Raveh, Technicon '92, Ph.D. '99, focuses her research in the area of aeroelasticity, the interaction between aerodynamic forces and flexible structures. She earned her Technion degrees in aerospace engineering and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology before joining the Technion in 2001.
Host: Professor Earl Dowell