Wind Tunnel Testing of an Aeroelastically Tailored Horizontal Stabilizer

Typical horizontal stabilizers fitted to passenger jets feature backward-swept planforms, which exhibit increased washout under aerodynamic load. The effect of this aeroelastic behavior is a reduction in the lift generated and thus a shallower lift-curve slope. A compromise due to this shortcoming is often increasing the size and structural stiffness of the stabilizers to maintain compliance to control and stability requirements, which has an undesirable consequence of adding drag and weight to the aircraft. This paper reports on the wind tunnel testing undertaken as part of research into using aeroelastic tailoring to minimize such a performance deficit for a more lightweight and smaller horizontal stabilizer design. The wind tunnel test campaign consists of testing a prototype in the forward, backward and zero-sweep configuration, demonstrating experimentally the improvement achieved with an optimized composite skin layup.