Patent — available for licensing
Methods for Predicting Transonic Flutter Using Simple Data Models
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
Aircraft moving at transonic speeds (i.e., ~0.7 to 0.85 Mach - or near the speed of sound) experience transonic wing flutter. Engineers have traditionally relied on experimental or computational methods to understand wing flutter for the design process. Modeling wing flutter using the customary computational methods require tens of hours of simulations on a supercomputer that are costly to buy or rent. Having a method to model wing flutter aerodynamics without requiring supercomputer use would (a) increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of aircraft wing design and (b) enable real-time wing-flutter modeling to aid in-flight aircraft operation and control. Ames Research Center has developed a novel closed-form solution to model wing flutter aerodynamics for any aircraft wing (within a certain thickness regime and without camber). This closed-form solution can be readily extended to wing sections with camber. The closed-form solution matches, in near real-time, the complex supercomputer simulations at a fraction of cost and time necessary to perform transonic flutter modeling for an airfoil.