General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. A recent consideration in aircraft design is the use of folding wing-tips with the aim of enabling higher aspect ratio aircraft with less induced drag, but also meeting airport gate limitations. This study investigates the effect of exploiting folding wing-tips in-flight, as device to reduce both static and dynamic loads. A representative civil jet aircraft aeroelastic model was used to explore the effect of introducing a wing-tip device, connected to the wings with an elastic hinge, on the loads behavior. For the dynamic cases, vertical discrete gusts and continuous turbulence were considered. The effect of hinge orientation, stiffness, damping and wing-tip weight on the static and dynamic response was investigated. It was found that significant reductions in both the static and dynamic loads were possible. For the case considered, a 25% increase in span using folding wing-tips resulted in almost no increase in loads.

A recent consideration in aircraft design is the use of folding wing-tips with the aim of enabling higher aspect ratio aircraft with less induced drag, but also meeting airport gate limitations. This study builds on previous work investigating the effect of exploiting folding wing-tips in-flight as a device to reduce dynamic gust loads, but now with the introduction of a passive nonlinear hinge spring to allow wing-tip deflections only for larger load cases. A representative civil jet aircraft aeroelastic model is used in a multi-body simulation code to explore the effect of introducing such a hinged wing-tip device on the loads behavior. It was found that significant reductions in the dynamic loads were possible. Nomenclature

A recent consideration in aircraft design is the use of folding wing-tips with the aim of enabling higher aspect ratio aircraft with less induced drag, but also meeting airport gate limitations. This study investigates the impact of floating folding wing-tips on the aircraft flight dynamics. It is found that a floating wing-tips aircraft has similar handling qualities with respect to an aircraft with no wing extension.

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