Internal Resonance and Stall-Flutter in a Pitch-Flap Wing in the Wind-Tunnel

Nonlinear aeroelastic phenomena such as store-induced LCOs, transonic buzz and stall flutter are the burden or modern aircraft: they reduce the performance and can even limit the flight envelope in both civil and military cases. Several nonlinear setups were studied experimentally in the last decades by the scientific community but most of them have pitch and plunge degrees of freedom and feature a rigid wing. In this paper, we study a new nonlinear aeroelastic apparatus that features nonlinear pitch and flap degrees of freedom, coupled with a flexible wing. The model is tested experimentally in the wind tunnel to determine its dynamic behaviour. Preliminary observations demonstrate that the system undergoes a supercritical Hopf bifurcation due to the hardening nonlinearity followed by an amplitude jump that is the consequence of either dynamic stall (i.e. stall flutter) or internal resonance (i.e. interaction between the hardening nonlinearity and higher modes).