Aeroelastic tailoring via ribs orientation of NASA Common Research Model

A baseline model in reference to the NASA Common Research Model is selected to illustrate the concept of aeroelastic tailoring of wing ribs structure by varying the orientation of the ribs. This enables the torsional-bending modes characteristic to be altered, which results in a possibility of improvement in the aeroelastic performance without having to compromise its overall weight. Two strategies are implanted in this work: the first strategy considers the whole ribs to be oriented in parallel while the second one is by dividing the wing into six parts where the ribs are allowed to be oriented in parallel within their part only. In many cases, there are a significant improvement with up to 5.5% of flutter increment via orientating the ribs section, hence leading to a possibility in significant structural weight reduction.