Experimental and Numerical Investigations of Mini-Tab Device for Active Flow Control

What is it about?

Tilt rotor aircraft will be a cornerstone in the upcoming Urban Air Mobility market. A key concern for these aircraft is whirl flutter - a potentially catastrophic instability that occurs between external aerodynamics and flexible structures - which limits maximum forward flight speed. This research explores an active control device called a mini-tab that is capable of rapidly altering the aerodynamic loads around a wing - the idea being that this could suppress the instability. We show for the first time that the unsteady mini-tab performance is insensitive to unsteady wing motions and provide modifications to an existing reduced-order model to better capture the nonlinear performance of the mini-tab.

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Photo by Mike Cox on Unsplash

Photo by Mike Cox on Unsplash