Modern materials along with recent advances in manufacturing processes of lightweight aerostructures have inaugurated a new ground to the design of future aircraft. Novel air-vehicles often present wings with increased aspect ratio and reduced weight, yielding a substantial cutback of induced drag – one of the main drag parcels acting on standard flights. This enhanced performance means that significant contributions can be made to saving fossil fuels and thus to reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. Nonetheless, these advantages come at a price; high aspect ratio, lightweight wings lead to important challenges in the area of controllability, maneuvers, gust loads, and flutter stability, due to the accentuated flexibility.
In order to reduce loads sufficiently, control systems for load reduction must then be planned for the upcoming aircraft generation. Moreover, in cases at which the aircraft is naturally prone to flutter occurrence, active systems must also be able to suppress this instability. However, these innovative systems are not straight available on the aviation market nowadays. Therefore, in the WISDOM (Wing Integrated Systems Demonstration On Mechatronic rig) joint project, several aspects of safety-critical, multifunctional flight control systems for highly efficient, elongated wings are evaluated.
The major objectives of the WISDOM group range from the development of system components - as prototypes - up to manufacturing and testing them. The later are performed in a hybrid manner, by using a wing-like testbed rig that consists of hardware modules coupled to simulated aircraft’s (sub)systems. Additionally, WISDOM aims at stablishing an effective scientific-industrial network that deals with future operating systems for high aspect ratio wings, within Germany.
The joint project is divided into seven main work packages (HAP), as following, coordinated by the joint project leader DLR, and distributed between the partners DLR, Liebherr, FFT, and Diehl-Aerospace.
HAP1 | Flight Control System Design |
HAP2 | Actuation System |
HAP3 | Structural Components |
HAP4 | Avionic System |
HAP5 | Overall Simulation |
HAP6 | Integration Platform |
HAP7 | Demonstration |
The TU Berlin, via the Department of Flight Mechanics, Flight Control and Aeroelasticity (FMRA), is assigned to work packages on the HAP1 and HAP5, in close cooperation with Liebherr and DLR. In short, within WISDOM, the TU Berlin focuses on the development of a real-time simulation model of flexible aircraft that accounts for aeroelastic effects. These simulations are intended to be embedded into existing and available flight simulators (SEPHIR and AVES) for verification and validation of load reduction and flutter suppression functionalities, apart from several flight physics investigations. Further TUB assignments include the development of control functionalities to enable a precise, manual path guidance, and the development of an operating system for the controller modes.
Organization name | Flight Mechanics, Flight Control and Aeroelasticity |
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Office | F 5 |
Room | F 336 |
Office | F 5 |
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Room | F 336 |
Organization name | Flight Mechanics, Flight Control and Aeroelasticity |
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Office | F 5 |
Room | F 334 |
Project duration: 01/2022 – 03/2025
LuFo VI-1