A wind tunnel technique for determining stability derivatives from cable mounted aeroelastic models

Abstract

System identification techniques in common use for extracting stability derivatives from flight test data have been adapted for application to data obtained from aeroelastically-scaled flutter models flown in a wind tunnel on a cable mount system. The concept has been applied with reasonable success to data from rigid models of a Space Shuttle Orbiter and a fighter tested in the NASA Langley transonic dynamics tunnel. Further application of this technique should permit extraction of derivatives that include scaled flexibility effects, thereby obtaining additional information from the testing of expensive flutter models.