Mission and Aircraft Design of FLEXOP Unmanned Flying Demonstrator to Test Flutter Suppression within Visual Line of Sight

H∞ Control Design for Active Flutter Suppression of Flexible-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Demonstrator

“…The design of the FLEXOP UAV is reported in [23]. The flexiblewing demonstrator features a wingspan of 7 m, with an aspect ratio of 20.…”

On Subscale Flight Testing : Applications in Aircraft Conceptual Design

“…Another programme in which a remotely piloted model is used to study a similar aeroelastic phenomenon is the Flutter-free Flight Envelope Extension for Economical Performance Improvement (FLEXOP) research project [83,84]. This European project, part of the Horizon 2020 initiative, is currently ongoing and it involves several European universities and manufacturers.…”

“…Another option is to design the whole subscale experiment starting from the available flight testing conditions and defining a hypothetical vehicle that would fit such conditions. This alternative was chosen in the FLEXOP project: the design of the test article was strictly bound to the mission design [84] and it did not correspond to any particular full-scale aircraft. Nevertheless, strong accelerations and decelerations were still required to reach the desired flight conditions during the short legs of the remote flight test.…”

“…Either structural stiffness is lowered or flight speed increased. [6,71,78,84,85] Logging structural dynamics requires specific instruments and filters designed for sampling higher frequencies than those found in flight dynamics.…”

“…As a matter of fact, three of the experimental platforms mentioned in the aeroelastic scaling section (3.4) could also be included in this section: the X-56A MUTT [78,79,80], the FLEXOP demonstrator [83,84], and the modified COTS model by Ouellette et al [82] leave aside the complete similarity with a full-scale vehicle in order to provide better capabilities for experimentation and demonstration within a feasible model flight envelope.…”