Aeroelastic implications of active winglet concept aimed to improve civil transport aircraft performances
Résumé
Reduction of aircraft environmental footprint has become over years a key
objective for the industry. Particularly, for decades winglets have been proven to eficiently reduce drag and fuel consumption. However, the design of those wingtip extensions mainly relies on an aerodynamic shape optimisation for a given cruise condition resulting in suboptimal behaviour for the rest of the
flight. Active winglet concept proposes to optimise the winglet cant angle along the flight to compensate the loss of eficiency inherent to fixed designs. The variation of winglet deflection impacts the lift distribution with repercussion on wing deformation that must be investigated. Besides, the presence of moving masses
at the tip of the wing also has influence on dynamic response and particularly on
flutter onset. This work proposes to evaluate those impacts through an aeroelastic analysis of
both static and dynamic implications of active winglets combined with an aerodynamic
performances optimisation. The XRF1, an Airbus provided industrial standard multi-
disciplinary research test case representing a typical configuration for wide body long-
range aircraft, is used as the baseline aircraft. Coupled CFD/CSM computations are
performed to assess the evolution of wing shape with respect to winglets deflections and the
consequences on mission performance optimisation. While a parametric flutter analysis
is carried-out to highlight the dependence of critical flutter speed on winglet cant angle.
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