Buffeting mitigation using carbon nanotube composites: a feasibility study

Abstract

The article describes a feasibility study to assess the use of nanotubes-based composites to mitigate tail buffeting. The buffeting of a representative business jet rudder is considered as case study. The baseline rudder configuration consists in a sandwich structure with honeycomb core and carbon/epoxy IM7/8552 skins. The damping characteristics of the baseline rudder configuration are compared to those achieved employing constrained layer Al/3M467 skin patches, and those obtained by dispersing multi-walled carbon nanotubes in the baseline carbon/epoxy material. The loads applied to the rudder during flight are obtained by airworthiness standards. Static and dynamic finite element analyses of the rudder under flight loads are carried out to evaluate the structural response at two different temperatures, −40 ℃ and +30 ℃. IM7/8552/MWNT with 1.5 wt% nanofiller is shown to have the best overall performance for the case study considered here, with the potential of outperforming conventional constrained layer patches for buffeting mitigation.