REVIEW ARTICLE


Uncertainty Quantification of a Flapping Airfoil with Stochastic Velocity Deviations Using the Response Surface Method



Liangyu Zhao*, 1, 2, Xiaqing Zhang2
1 Key Laboratory of Dynamics and Control of Flight Vehicle, Ministry of Education, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
2 School of Aerospace Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2011
Volume: 5
First Page: 152
Last Page: 159
Publisher Id: TOMEJ-5-152
DOI: 10.2174/1874155X01105010152

Article History:

Received Date: 14/2/2011
Revision Received Date: 13/4/2011
Acceptance Date: 13/4/2011
Electronic publication date: 19/12/2011
Collection year: 2010

© 2010 Zhao and Zhang

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Office 14, School of Aerospace Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China; Tel: +86-13810122023 (Mobile), +86-10-68912419(Office); Fax:+86-10-68911040; E-mail: zhaoly@bit.edu.cn


Abstract

A practical flapping wing micro air vehicle should have ability to withstand stochastic deviations of flight velocities. To design a flapping airfoil with this ability, it is necessary to evaluate the impacts of velocity deviations on the flapping performances numerically or analytically. In this paper, the responses of the time-averaged thrust coefficient and the propulsive efficiency with respect to a stochastic flight velocity deviation under Gauss distribution are numerically investigated using a classic Monte Carlo method. The response surface method is employed to surrogate the high fidelity CFD model to save computational cost. It is observed that both of the time-averaged thrust coefficient and the propulsive efficiency obey a Gauss-like but not the exact Gauss distribution. The effect caused by the velocity deviation on the timeaveraged thrust coefficient is larger than the one on the propulsive efficiency.

Keywords: Uncertainty quantification, flapping airfoil, velocity deviation, response surface method.