Numerical and experimental investigations on active flutter suppression technologies

This paper discusses the activities carried out during two years of a dedicated project to investigate active flutter suppression technologies and the impact of uncertainties on the expected performances. The investigation is done numerically and through an extended wind tunnel test campaign. Starting from an already available wind tunnel model it is significantly modified to create a new conventional configuration showing a flutter behavior of a typical transport aircraft. The experimental activity has been splitted in two main phases. At first, a half-wing will be tested in a wall clamped configuration to setup the all the hardware components like the flutter controllers based on the aileron, as well the safety devices to avoid breaking the model, in a more manageable configuration. Then, the complete model in free-free configuration has been tested inside the large POLIMI’s wind tunnel for the final validation. The paper will describe in details the activities carried out and the experimental results of the wind tunnel test campaign until now.