A new technique for identification of eighteen flutter derivatives using a three-degree-of-freedom section model

The prediction of flutter instability is of major concern for design of flexible structures. This necessitates the identification of aeroelastic parameters, known as flutter derivatives from wind tunnel experiments. The extraction of flutter derivatives becomes more challenging when the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) increases from two to three. Since the work in the field of identifying all 18 flutter derivatives has been limited, it has motivated the development of a new system identification method (iterative least squares method or ILS method) to efficiently extract the flutter derivatives using a section model suspended by a three-DOF elastic suspension system. The accuracy of a particular flutter derivative was determined by comparing the results obtained from all possible DOF combinations.