Advancements in Optical Diagnostics for Experimental Aeroelasticity

Abstract

Experimental aeroelasticity has been hindered by the intrusivity of measurement equipment and complexity of the experimental setups. Advancements in hardware development have been encouraging optical tracking techniques to replace cross correlation approaches in experimental aerodynamics. However, digital image correlation (DIC) is still the standard optical technique in structural diagnostics. The first experiment of the dissertation assesses the accuracy of an established tracking technique, such as Shake-the-Box, for tracking surface markers on a moving panel, comparing it to DIC. Despite being outperformed in terms of spatial resolution by DIC, surface marker tracking resulted in the same order of accuracy, making structural tracking suitable for large-scale applications. Such results imply the feasibility of characterizing experimentally aeroelastic problems by tracking, in a simultaneous manner, flow tracers and surfacemarkers....