Identification of in-flight wingtip folding effects on the roll characteristics of a flexible aircraft

Wingtip folding is a means by which an aircraft’s wingspan can be extended, allowing designers to take advantage of the associated reduction in induced drag. This type of device can provide other benefits if used in flight, such as flight control and load alleviation. In this paper, the authors present a method to develop reduced order flight dynamic models for in-flight wingtip folding, which are suitable for implementation in real-time pilot-in-the-loop simulations. Aspects such as the impact of wingtip size and folding angle on aircraft roll dynamics are investigated along with failure scenarios using a time domain aeroservoelastic framework and an established system identification method. The process discussed in this paper helps remove the need for direct connection of complex physics based models to engineering flight simulators and the need for tedious programming of large look-up-tables in simulators. Instead, it has been shown that a generic polynomial model for roll aeroderivatives can be used in small roll perturbation conditions to simulate the roll characteristics of an aerodynamic derivative based large transport aircraft equipped with varying fold hinge lines and tip deflections. Moreover, the effects of wing flexibility are also considered.