Abstract
Stall-induced aeroelastic motion may present severe non-linear behavior. Mathematical models for predicting such phenomena are still not available for practical applications and they are not enough reliable to capture physical effects. Experimental data can provide suitable information to help the understanding of typical non-linear aeroelastic phenomena. Dynamic systems techniques based on time series analysis can be adequately applied to non-linear aeroelasticity. When experimental data are available, the methods of state space reconstruction have been widely considered. This paper presents the state space reconstruction approach for the characterization of the stall-induced aeroelastic non-linear behavior. A wind tunnel scaled wing model has been tested. The wing model is subjected to different airspeeds and dynamic incidence angle variations. The method of delays is used to identify an embedded attractor in the state space from experimentally acquired aeroelastic response time series. To obtain an estimate of the time delay used in the state space reconstruction from time series, the autocorrelation function analyis is used. For the calculation of the embedding dimension the correlation integral approach is considered. The reconstructed attractors can reveal typical non-linear structures associated, for instance, to chaos or limit cycles.