Ground Vibration Test of a Modular Remotely Piloted Vehicle

Abstract

In the search for cleaner and greener ways to fly, the development of hybrid and fully electric aircraft presents a significant challenge for academics, researchers, development centers and industry. From the conceptual and preliminary design to the development of scaled Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPV) and even 1:1 scale aircraft, numerous and diverse concepts have been presented in the FLEXCRAFT project. The mentioned project consists in developing a hybrid modular (in the sense that it flies with and without a fuselage pod attached) short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft that can transport different fuselage pods, depending on the mission (9 passengers or 900 kg of payload) up to 1000 km for the general aviation segment. In this work, the authors present the Ground Vibration Test (GVT) performed on a scaled (1:10) RPV of the FLEXCRAFT project concept. From the obtained experimental data are estimated the modal parameters (e.g., natural frequencies, damping factors and mode shapes) for the RPV configuration without the fuselage pod attached. The goal of this GVT is to obtain experimental data for updating of the finite element model and by this way to achieve a more accurate dynamic behavior prediction as well as to provide useful insights on the aeroelastic and dynamic structural behavior of the RPV for the programmed flight test campaign.

Type
Publication
ICEDyn 2019 - International Conference on Structural Engineering Dynamics