New Robust Method to Study Flight Flutter Testing

Abstract

This paper presents the application of a new method, called higher-order dynamic mode decomposition (HODMD), to extract aircraft frequencies and damping in experimental data obtained from a flight flutter test. The method is an extension of standard dynamic mode decomposition, which is a method typically used to extract flow patterns and frequencies from unsteady fluid dynamics measurements or numerical simulations. In the fluid dynamic field, HODMD has proven to be a very efficient, robust, and accurate method to extract modes, frequencies, and damping from very noisy and large signals, with reduced manual interaction. In a similar way, this paper shows the good performance of this method when it is applied to the noisy data of this complex experiment. This fact sheds light on the new possibilities for the aerospace industry to incorporate HODMD to perform robust analyses.