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A recent consideration in aircraft design is the use of folding wing-tips with the aim of enabling higher aspect ratio aircraft with less induced drag while also meeting airport gate limitations. This study investigates the effect of exploiting folding wing-tips in flight as a device to reduce both static and dynamic loads. A representative civil jet aircraft aeroelastic model was used to explore the effect of introducing a wing-tip device, connected to the wings with an elastic hinge, on the load behaviour. For the dynamic cases, vertical discrete gusts and continuous turbulence were considered. The effects of hinge orientation, stiffness, damping and wing-tip weight on the static and dynamic response were investigated. It was found that significant reductions in both the static and dynamic loads were possible. For the case considered, a 25% increase in span using folding wing-tips resulted in almost no increase in loads.

The variability in ground manoeuvre occurrences for aircraft landing gear is intrinsically linked to the airport geometries served by aircraft in-service and consequently, the cyclic loads that landing gear carry are driven by the route network and characteristics of aircraft operators. Currently, assumptions must be made when deriving fatigue load spectra for aircraft landing gear, which may fail to capture the operator characteristics, potentially leading to design conservatism. This paper presents the enhanced characterisation of ground turning manoeuvres within the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) trajectories for six narrow-body aircraft across a full-service carrier (FSC) and a low-cost carrier (LCC) fleet. The methodology presented within this paper employs ADS-B latitude and longitude information to overcome limitations of previous approaches, increasing the rate of correct manoeuvre identification within ADS-B trajectories to 77% of flights from the 50% rate achieved previously. When characterising the ground manoeuvres across 3,000 flights, significant differences in manoeuvre occurrences were observed between individual aircraft within the LCC fleet and between the FSC and LCC fleets. The occurrence of tight and pivot turns were shown to vary across the six aircraft with six and eight fatigue-critical turns being performed by the FSC and LCC fleet for every 10 flights performed. In addition, it was observed that the direction of fatigue critical turns is biased in specific directions, suggesting that individual main landing gear assemblies will accumulate fatigue damage at an increased rate, leading to greater justification for operator-specific spectra and structural health monitoring of aircraft landing gear.

This paper describes a new efficient method for the construction of an approximately balanced aerodynamic Reduced Order Model (ROM) via the frequency domain using Computational Fluid Dynamics data. Time domain ROM construction requires CFD data, which is obtained from the DLR TAU RANS or Euler Linearised Frequency Domain (LFD) solver. The ROMs produced with this approach, using a small number of frequency simulations, are shown to exhibit a strong ability to reconstruct the system response for inviscid flow about the NLR7301 aerofoil and the FFAST wing; and viscous flow about the NASA Common Research Model. The latter demonstrates that the reduced order model approach can reconstruct the full order frequency response of a viscous aircraft configuration with excellent accuracy using a strip wise approach. The time domain models are built using the frequency domain, but also give promising results when applied to reconstruct non-periodic motions. Results are compared to time domain simulations, showing good agreement even with small ROM sizes, but with a substantial reduction in calculation time. The main advantage of the current model order reduction approach is that the method does not require the formation and storage of large matrices, such as in POD approaches.

In this paper, the accuracy and practical capabilities of three different reduced-order models (ROMs) are explored: an enhanced implicit condensation and expansion (EnICE) model, a finite element beam model, and a finite volume beam model are compared for their capability to accurately predict the nonlinear structural response of geometrically nonlinear built-up wing structures. This work briefly outlines the different order reduction methods, highlighting the associated assumptions and computational effort. The ROMs are then used to calculate the wing deflection for different representative load cases and these results are compared with the global finite element model (GFEM) predictions when possible. Overall, the ROMs are found to be able to capture the nonlinear GFEM behaviour accurately, but differences are noticed at very large displacements and rotations due to local geometrical effects.

Landing gear are exposed to cyclic loads from the ground manoeuvres that aircraft perform in-service. Variability is observed in the loading magnitude associated with ground manoeuvres, along with the per-flight variability in ground manoeuvre occurrence and sequencing. Whilst loading magnitude variability has been widely characterised, significant assumptions are required regarding manoeuvre occurrence and sequencing when constructing landing gear load spectra for fatigue design. These assumptions are required due to the limited availability of data concerning ground manoeuvre occurrence and sequencing relating to aircraft in-service and require validation to facilitate the design of more efficient components. ‘Big-Data’ approaches, employing Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) transponder data, enable aircraft ground tracks to be identified. This paper presents a methodology to characterise the variability in ground manoeuvre occurrence and sequencing using ADS-B data sourced from Flightradar24® for a wide-body aircraft fleet. Using statistics generated for the fleet, it was identified that significant variability exists in the occurrence and sequencing of turning and braking manoeuvres. The statistics also validate existing assumptions, including that the proportional share of left and right turning manoeuvres is equal. Finally, this paper discusses the utility of ADS-B datasets for constructing landing gear load spectra and monitoring of landing gear in-service.

VFAs (very flexible aircraft) have begun to attract significant attention because of their good flight performances and significant application potentials; however, they also bring some challenges to researchers due to their unusual lightweight designs and large elastic deformations. A framework for the geometrically nonlinear aeroelastic stability analysis of very flexible wings is constructed in this paper to illustrate the unique aeroelastic characteristics and convenient use of these designs in engineering analysis. The nonlinear aeroelastic analysis model includes the geometrically nonlinear structure finite elements and steady and unsteady nonplanar aerodynamic computations (i.e., the nonplanar vortex lattice method and nonplanar doublet-lattice method). Fully nonlinear methods are used to analyse static aeroelastic features, and linearized structural dynamic equations are established at the structural nonlinear equilibrium state to estimate the stability of the system through the quasimode of the stressed and deformed structure. The exact flutter boundary is searched via an iterative procedure. A wind tunnel test is conducted to validate this theoretical analysis framework, and reasonable agreement is obtained. Both the analysis and test results indicate that the geometric nonlinearity of very flexible wings presents significantly different aeroelastic characteristics under different load cases with large deformations.

All aircraft are subject to a range of loading throughout ground and flight operations, which ultimately define the sizing and weight of the aircraft structure. Active and passive loads alleviation technologies provide an approach to reduce dynamic loads arising from atmospheric gusts and turbulence, leading to more fuel-efficient aircraft designs. Within the H2020 SLOWD project, fuel sloshing is being considered as a method for alleviating loads in aircraft wings via an increase in effective damping. Recent work has considered the transient response of a vertically vibrating, single degree of freedom system coupled to a rectangular liquid-filled tank. This research revealed identifiable dissipation regions in the free vibration responses characterised by their own distinct equivalent damping ratio values. In this work, free surface displacement has been extracted from high-speed camera footage during the chosen sloshing regimes, which are representative of a decaying parametrically excited fluid. These results are compared against a fluid-structure coupled numerical model based upon smoothed particle hydrodynamics, previously shown to have good agreement with the experimental damping response. Further analysis of the free-surface response of the numerical solution notes a presence of an undesired travelling longitudinal wave. The analysis of this discrepancy between the model and experiment is then used to improve the numerical formulation, showing a requirement for modelling surface tension.

Feedback linearisation is a well-known technique in the controls community but has not been widely taken up in the vibrations community. It has the advantage of linearising nonlinear system models, thereby enabling the avoidance of the complicated mathematics associated with nonlinear problems. A particular and common class of problems is considered, where the nonlinearity is present in a system parameter and a formulation in terms of the usual second-order matrix differential equation is presented. The classical texts all cast the feedback linearisation problem in first-order form, requiring repeated differentiation of the output, usually presented in the Lie algebra notation. This becomes unnecessary when using second-order matrix equations of the problem class considered herein. Analysis is presented for the general multidegree of freedom system for those cases when a full set of sensors and actuators is available at every degree of freedom and when the number of sensors and actuators is fewer than the number of degrees of freedom. Adaptive feedback linearisation is used to address the problem of nonlinearity that is not known precisely. The theory is illustrated by means of a three-degree-of-freedom nonlinear aeroelastic model, with results demonstrating the effectiveness of the method in suppressing flutter.

A subtraction hybridization and PCR amplification procedure was used to isolate two Rhizobium DNA probes which exhibited high degrees of specificity at different levels of taxonomic organization and which could be used as tools for detection of rhizobia in ecological studies. First, a probe was isolated from Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. trifolii strain P3 by removing those Sau3A restriction fragments from a P3 DNA digest which cross hybridized with pooled DNA from seven other strains of the same biovar. The remaining restriction fragments hybridized to DNA from strain P3 but not to DNA from any of the seven other strains. In a similar experiment another DNA probe, specific for the Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. phaseoli and Rhizobium tropici group, was generated by removing sequences from R. leguminosarum bv phaseoli strain Kim 5s with pooled subtracter DNA from eight other Rhizobium, Bradyrhizobium and Agrobacterium species. The same subtraction hybridization technique was also used to isolate symbiotic genes from a Rhizobium species. Results from a 1:1 subtractive DNA hybridization of the broad host range Rhizobium sp NGR234 against highly homologous S. fredii USDA257, combined with those from competitive RNA hybridizations to cosmid digests of the NGR234 symbiotic plasmid, allowed the identification of several NGR234 loci which were flavonoid-inducible and not present in S. fredii USDA257. One of these, ORF-1, was highly homologous to the leucine responsive regulatory protein of E. coli.