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Minimum-Mass Panels Under Probabilistic Aeroelastic Flutter Constraints, Bret Stanford, Philip Beran

U.S. Air Force Research

Aeroelastic flutter is a dangerous failure mode, and aircraft structural components are designed under a deterministic flutter margin. Meeting this safety factor may result in overly-conservative structures, however, an alternative approach incorporates uncertainties into the computational models, and imposes a maximum allowable flutter probability during the optimization process. This technique is demonstrated for the variable-thickness design of an elastic panel subjected to supersonic flow. A performance measure approach based on the first -order reliability method incorporates probabilistic flutter constraints during the search for a minimum-mass panel. Optimization results are given for uncertainties in the panel's boundary conditions, and for non-deterministic …