On-ground experimental simulation of flutter based on reduced-order modeling for elastically-supported panels

On-Ground Experimental Simulation of Flutter (OGESF) is an emerging airflow-free methodology for flutter testing of large-scale structures, in which equivalent flutter phenomena are reproduced. However, it currently faces a control-channel scalability problem when applied to high-degree-of-freedom systems. This study proposes an equivalent approach to OGESF based on reduced-order modeling (OGESF-ROM), in which Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) is used to transform the high-dimensional model into a reduced-order representation. The generalized-coordinate equivalence strategy is employed to predict the structural surface displacement and velocity fields while maintaining the consistency between the equivalent concentrated aerodynamic forces and the distributed aerodynamic forces. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified through theoretical analysis of a supersonic elastically-supported panel and comparison with the corresponding experimental data. The results show that the OGESF-ROM reduces the number of required control channels by 91.84%. The theoretically predicted critical Mach number agrees well with the experimental result, with relative errors of the flutter response amplitudes and frequencies below 7.43% and 2.89%, respectively. This study provides guidance for OGESF-based experimental investigations into flutter characteristics in large-scale structures.