Bending-Torsional Aeroelastic Instability of a Tapered Aircraft wing in an Incompressible Flow

The bending-torsional instability of a tapered aircraft wing with store in an incompressible flow is considered in this paper. To this aim, a computer code capabling of determining the aeroelastic stability is developed based on the Galerkin method, and the Theodorsen model is used for calculation of the unsteady aerodynamic loads. To obtain the areroelastic instability margin, the resulting equations are solved in frequency domain using the K-method. It is found that certain combinations of the wing and aerodynamics parameters (air density, the position of store, the position of elastic axis and wing center of gravity) can destabilize the wing.