ATTILA project Kick Off Meeting
The ATTILA (Advanced Testbed for TILtrotor Aeroelastics) project is aimed at the design, manufacture and testing of an advanced testbed for aeroelastic wind tunnel testing of tiltrotor aircraft. The testbed will consist of a suitably instrumented aeroelastically scaled cantilevered half-wing with powered nacelle-proprotor system. After design and manufacturing, the ATTILA testbed will be subjected to a ground and wind-on shakedown test in the DNW facilites. After the system functionality and structural dynamic characteristics have been verified, a second, full-featured data gathering test will be performed. The proposed test campaign provides the highest possible fidelity experimental demonstration of the whirl flutter characteristics of the NGCTR-TD prior to high-speed flight testing in 2024-2025. Real-time modal damping analysis during the test will enable a productive and safe test campaign to be performed. The post-test data analysis phase includes a test-to-code correlation study. The research team is composed of 2 research centres (NLR & DLR), 1 non-profit foundation (DNW), 1 university (POLIMI), and 1 SME (Technobis). Together, the Partners have extensive and complementary experience in the design & manufacture, aeroelastic wind tunnel testing, and numerical analysis of tiltrotor wind tunnel models for research and development purposes. The kick-off of the project took place on DNW’s premises in Marknesse (NL) on November 13-14, 2019.