Fuselage

Abstract: Aluminum alloys have been the primary material of choice for structural components of aircraft since about 1930. Although polymer matrix composites are being used extensively in high-performance military aircraft and are being specified for some applications in modern commercial aircraft, aluminum alloys are the overwhelming choice for the fuselage, wing, and supporting structure of commercial airliners and military cargo and transport. Well known performance characteristics, known fabrication costs, design experience, and established manufacturing methods and facilities, are just a few of the reasons for the continued confidence in aluminum alloys that will ensure their use in significant quantities for the rest of this century and likely well into the next one. But most significantly, there have been major advances in aluminum aircraft alloys that continue to keep them in a competitive position. In the early years aluminum alloys were developed by trial and error, but over the past thirty years there have been significant advances in our understanding of the relationships among composition, processing, microstructural characteristics and properties. This knowledge base has led to improvements in properties that are important to aircraft applications. This review covers the performance and property requirements for airframe components in current aircraft and describes aluminum alloys and product forms which meet these requirements. It also discusses the structure/property relationships of aluminum aircraft alloys and describes the background and drivers for the development of modern aluminum alloys to improve performance. Finally, technologies under development for future aircraft are discussed.

Abstract: The development of a wing/body/nacelle/pylon/horizontal-tail configuration for a common research model is presented, with focus on the aerodynamic design of the wing. Here, a contemporary transonic supercritical wing design is developed with aerodynamic characteristics that are well behaved and of high performance for configurations with and without the nacelle/pylon group. The horizontal tail is robustly designed for dive Mach number conditions and is suitably sized for typical stability and control requirements. The fuselage is representative of a wide/body commercial transport aircraft; it includes a wing-body fairing, as well as a scrubbing seal for the horizontal tail. The nacelle is a single-cowl, high by-pass-ratio, flow-through design with an exit area sized to achieve a natural unforced mass-flow-ratio typical of commercial aircraft engines at cruise. The simplicity of this un-bifurcated nacelle geometry will facilitate grid generation efforts of subsequent CFD validation exercises. Detailed aerodynamic performance data has been generated for this model; however, this information is presented in such a manner as to not bias CFD predictions planned for the fourth AIAA CFD Drag Prediction Workshop, which incorporates this common research model into its blind test cases. The CFD results presented include wing pressure distributions with and without the nacelle/pylon, ML/D trend lines, and drag-divergence curves; the design point for the wing/body configuration is within 1% of its max-ML/D. Plans to test the common research model in the National Transonic Facility and the Ames 11-ft wind tunnels are also discussed.

Abstract: A nonlinear, physics-based model of the longitudinal dynamics for an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle is developed. The model is derived from first principles and captures a number of complex interactions between the propulsion system, aerodynamics, and structural dynamics. Unlike conventional aircraft, air-breathing hypersonic vehicles require that the propulsion system be highly integrated into the airframe. Furthermore, full-scale hypersonic aircraft tend to have very lightweight, flexible structures that have low natural frequencies. Therefore, the first bending mode of the fuselage is important, as its deflection affects the amount of airflow entering the engine, thus influencing the performance of the propulsion system. The equations of motion for the flexible aircraft are derivedusingLagrange’sequations.Theequationsof motioncaptureinertial couplingeffectsbetween thepitch and normal accelerations of the aircraft and the structural dynamics. The linearized aircraft dynamics are found to be unstableand,inmostcases,exhibitnonminimumphasebehavior.Thelinearizedmodelalsoindicatesthatthereisan aeroelastic mode that has a natural frequency more than twice the frequency of the fuselage bending mode, and the short-period mode is very strongly coupled with the bending mode of the fuselage.

Abstract: In order to make a stress analysis of seaplane floats, and especially of the members connecting the floats with the fuselage, it is of great importance to determine the maximum pressure acting on the floats during landing. Here, the author gives a formula for maximum pressures during landing that permits one to apply experimental results to different bodies and different velocities. The author notes that the formula checks very well with experimental results.

Abstract: A systematic procedure is developed for the calculation of the structural response of an airplane subject to dynamic loads. Particular attention is given the problem of determining the stresses developed due to flight through gusts. Difference equivalents for derivatives and matrix notation are used to develop a recurrence relation that permits step-by-step calculation of the response and of the loads that occur on the structure. The chief feature of this recurrence approach is that the generality and physical aspects of the basic equilibrium relations of the problem are preserved without loss of ease in application. The use of difference equivalents for derivatives in the solution of dynamic problems is first illustrated by means of a simple damped oscillator example, and the application to the flexible aircraft structure is then made. For brevity, the case of wing bending and vertical motion of the airplane is treated, although the method may be readily extended to take into account also wing torsional deformations, pitching motion of the airplane, fuselage deflections, and tail forces of known character. Either a sharp-edge gust or a gust of arbitrary shape in the spanwise or flight directions may be treated. Some results obtained by application of the recurrence matrix relation are presented, and the advantages of this method over other methods of evaluating the dynamic response of an aircraft are discussed.