Aeroelastic Design-Space Exploration for Gust-Energy Harvesting

Research into gust interactions has shown significant potential for extracting energy from the atmosphere. Notably, improvements to gust-energy extractions have been shown to be possible through aeroelastic tailoring. The present work uses a design-space exploration to quantify specific structural parameters that provide the greatest energy gains from discrete and continuous gust fields. Using a genetic algorithm and full-factorial parametric sweep, wing configurations that are stiff in bending but flexible in torsion were identified to provide the best energy gains for sinusoidal and 1-cosine gusts. These designs were also subjected to a continuous von Kármán gust field, showing the same trends as the discrete profiles. The influence of the elastic and mass axis locations was shown to be much weaker on the energy gain than the stiffness parameters. Overall, energy gains relative to the steady-gliding flight performance of the aircraft of 15% were shown to be achievable through aeroelastic tailoring.