Aeroelastic Optimization of Membrane Prestress on a Flapping Wing

Abstract

The paper presents a methodology for aeroelastic tailoring of membrane wing pretension for a flapping micro air vehicle (MAV) in forward flight. The aeroelastic model tightly couples a prestressed structural membrane finite element model with an unsteady vortex lattice aerodynamic model. Cubic prestress distributions in both the chordwise and spanwise directionsare independently prescribed to a flapping, rectangular, membrane wing. A gradient-based optimizer is used to maximize the cycle-average thrust generated by the wing. The optimal results tends toward a prestress distribution that is lower near the leading edge and higher at the trailing edge.