SLOSHING EFFECTS ON FREE-BODY COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT AEROELASTIC LOADS

The study presents the effect of nonlinear sloshing on internal loads experienced by commercial aircraft during severe gust excitations. The numerical approach consists of a hybrid modelling in which the aeroelasticity is approached via standard differential equations obtained by a modal description of the aircraft and a rational function approximation of the unsteady aerodynamic operator provided by an off-the-shelf aeroelastic solver, whereas the nonlinear behavior of the fluid stowed in the wing tanks is described via data-driven black-box model. More specifically, the black-box model consists of a neural network trained via experimental data on scaled problem. The model is then used to study the gust response of an Airbus provided research aircraft model via a verified scaling law that allows to integrate the model in different aircraft configuration.