Flutter Boundary Prediction Based on Structural Frequency Response Functions Acquired from Ground Test

Establishing an accurate, fast, and low-risk flutter boundary prediction method is of great significance for flight vehicle design. In this paper, a ground flutter boundary prediction method (GFBP) based on experimental structural frequency response functions (FRFs) is proposed. A low-order multi-input multi-output (MIMO) aeroelastic system is established by combining the structural FRFs acquired from a ground test and the calculated unsteady aerodynamic FRFs in physical coordinates. The multivariable Nyquist criterion is used to predict the flutter boundary. A fixed-root aluminum plate wing is selected as the research model. A GFBP experiment is carried out for the wing’s normal state, leading-edge clump weight state, and trailing-edge clump weight state. The feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method are verified by comparison with theoretical flutter results, in which the errors of flutter speed and frequency in the test statistics are no more than 1.7%. In a simulation model established by the proposed method, Monte Carlo simulation is used to study the influence of deviations in the mode frequency and damping of the structural FRFs and deviations in the positions of excitation and measurement points in the ground test. The experiment and simulation results show that the proposed method can predict the flutter boundary accurately with accurate positions of excitation and measurement points, and it has good robustness to deviations in the mode frequency and amplitude of the structural FRFs.