Tunable Aeroelasticity With Self-Tunable Composite Materials

This paper reports the dynamic performance of novel aerospace structures with embedded multiphase materials with tunable stiffness and damping parameters. The proposed structures embedded multiphase materials exploit the thermal loads generated in high-speed fights to tune the stiffness and damping parameters, and thus, enable adaptive aeroelastic stability. The reported findings show that the dynamics of an aerospace structure can be programmed to counter vibratory loads by manipulating the structural stiffness constant while increasing the damping drastically. The study consisted of modeling and experimental analyses for characterizing the dynamics of structures with multiphase materials, demonstrating stiffness and damping tuning with heat, and providing a comparison between using single-phase and two-phase materials. Results also show that the increase in internal thermal pressure with an increase in temperature of 30 ◦C is found to increase the structural damping of the structure by 45%. This demonstrates that a viable concept has been successfully developed with the potential to pave the way for novel use of multiphase materials in aerospace structures and adaptive vibration control.