The primary impacts of the project are related to the succesful active flutter control tests on a conventional configuration UAS, the release of a validated datasets to the aeroelasticity community within the Open Research Data initiative and the improved design environment comprising enhanced toolsets optimized for collaborative interactions within and across organizations, together with the best practices and standards for collaborative designenvironments as well as the design process itself. Since the developed tools are validated using a flight demonstrator, the reached Technology Readiness Level of this activity is TRL5.
The project went beyond the state-of-art in several topics: the RCE environment for MDO tasks, developed jointly between the partners and taking flutter control into consideration is a true novelty.
The aircraft avionics and sensing system also includes several novelties, increased reliance on angular rate measurements besides accelerometers.
The partners also developed, ground tested and flown a miniature operational modal analysis system.
The achieved results related to active flutter control needs no further explanation. Several projects, including ones led by Airbus and Dassault Aviation are looking at very similar problems and the project directly supplies information to them since both Airbus and Dassault were on the advisory group of the project.
Novel custom actuator system were developed within the project to actuate the flutter flaps, these are some of the highest frequency aerodynamic actuators fitted to a similar sized drone and required significant engineering effort beyond the state-of-art to manufacture and integrate them to the demonstrator.
The project also spent significant effort on Big Data based methods to provide a Machine Learning based solution to wingshape estimation (an essential component to wingshape control based drag reduction) using the KalmanNet architecture, and compare its results to traditional Eyxtended Kalman Filtering methods.
The project was the first in Germany and one of the first in Europe under the new EASA regulations to have flight authorization for a more than 25 kg fixed wing drone flying in commercial airspace. Both LBA and DLR Cochstedt Airport were very constructive and they also benefitted greatly from the approval process.
Many MDO projects have considered aerodynamics and structures coupled optimization, but only a handful of them considers maneuver and gust loads, hence the framework set up within the project for loads closed sizing loop for a commercial aircraft is also very novel.
