• Advances in aircraft and spacecraft science
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.117-144
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• 2019

High Altitude and Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft are capable of providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities over vast geographic areas when equipped with advanced sensor packages. As their use becomes more widespread, the demand for additional range, endurance and payload capability will increase and designers are exploring non-conventional configurations to meet the increasing demands. One such configuration is the joined-wing concept. A joined-wing aircraft is one that typically connects a front and aft wings in a diamond shaped planform. One such example is the Boeing SensorCraft configuration. While the joined-wing configuration offers potential benefits regarding aerodynamic efficiency, structural weight, and sensing capabilities, structural design requires careful consideration of elastic buckling resulting from the aft wing supporting, in compression, part of the forward wing structural loading. It has been shown already that this is a nonlinear phenomenon, involving geometric nonlinearities and follower forces that tend to flatten the entire configuration, leading to structural overload due to the loss of the aft wing's ability to support the forward wing load. Severe gusts are likely to be the critical design condition, with flight control system interaction in the form of Gust Load Alleviation (GLA) playing a key role in minimizing the structural loads. The University of Victoria Center for Aerospace Research (UVic-CfAR) has built a 3-meter span scaled and flexible wing UAV based on the Boeing SensorCraft design. The goal is to validate the nonlinear structural behavior in flight. The main objective of this research work is to perform Ground Vibration Tests (GVT) to characterize the dynamic properties of the scaled flight vehicle. Results from the experimental tests are used to characterize the modal dynamics of the aircraft, and to validate the numerical models. The GVT results are an important step towards a safe flight test program.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.10-17
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• 2016

This paper presents a laboratory validation of a new approach for Finite Element Model Updating(FEMU) on short-span bridges by combining ambient vibration measurements with static load input-deflection output measurements. The conventional FEMU approach based on modal parameters requires the assumption on the system mass matrix for the eigen-value analysis. The proposed approach doesn't require the assumption and even provides a way to update the mass matrix. The proposed approach consists of two steps: 1) updating the stiffness matrix using the static input-deflection output measurements, and 2) updating the mass matrix using a few lower natural frequencies. For a validation of the proposed approach, Young's modulus of the laboratory model was updated by the proposed approach and compared with the value obtained from strain-stress tests in a Universal Testing Machine. Result of the conventional FEMU was also compared with the result of the proposed approach. It was found that proposed approach successfully estimated the Young's modulus and the mass density reasonably while the conventional FEMU showed a large error when used with higher-modes. In addition, the FE modeling error was discussed.