Flutter analysis by using H-infinity norm

Abstract

It is very important to determine the critical utter point in aeroelastic stability analysis, because utter usually leads to lost of aeroelastic stability and even damage of structures. Aeroelastic dynamics is considered as a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, and then the H-infinity norm of the corresponding transfer function matrix is adopted in utter analysis by using the feature that it will approach to infinity near the critical utter point. An algorithm is developed to search the utter point based on the local maximum of H-infinity norm, which obtains more robustness on utter analysis compared with traditional approaches. Numerical example demonstrates the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method. Copyright © 2009 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.