A study on stochastic aeroelastic stability and flutter reliability of a wing (Q6143779)

This paper addresses the aeroelastic wing stability using the stochastic finite element method in conjunction with the first-order reliability method. For the prediction of the flutter onset in aeroelastic systems in the presence of uncertainties, three stability conditions are considered and represented as limit state functions. Due to various representations of limit states, a lack of invariance in reliability estimates is observed using the conventional flutter reliability approach such as the first-order second-moment method. In this paper, a general first-order reliability method is proposed, which is suitable for all the limit state functions considered and shows invariance in the reliability estimates. The proposed approach is applied to a wing having uncertain stiffness parameters, modeled by either random variables or random fields. The effect of correlation length on the flutter reliability of the wing is discussed. The computational efficiency of the suggested algorithm in comparison to Monte Carlo simulations is discussed for various limit states.