Control Surface Freeplay

Determining what values of freeplay are acceptable is a crucial question to the aviation industry. Current airworthiness regulations are extremely strict, particularly for all-moveable control surfaces, necessitating frequent and very expensive maintenance, even for new aircraft. Coming up with a way to rigorously calculate maximum safe freeplay limits allows commercial airlines and private air transport companies to be compliant with safety standards, but also to budget accurately from a financial standpoint.

Control Surface Freeplay: Mathematical Modeling, Analysis, and Computation takes a one-stop-shop approach that will allow readers to thoroughly understand the problem by first equipping them with the necessary engineering concepts and mathematical tools to then proceed to find the appropriate solution by using state-of-the-art computing technologies. Classical freeplay problems are explored in a palatable and carefully crafted manner to reinforce modeling techniques and methods of analysis to obtain important and meaningful results. Finally, recent advances and new trends in the field are provided for the interested readers.

This comprehensive work provides a useful reference to both new and experienced industry practitioners and academics who wish to find the key information they need from a single source.

• Presents the fundamentals of synthesizing aeroelastic models with freeplay nonlinearity
• Includes the fundamental analytical methods and computational tools to obtain meaningful numerical results for solving problems involving freeplay
• Interprets the time-invariant and time-dependent aeroelastic behavior from data obtained by solving problems involving control surface freeplay