Beam Element-Based Inverse Finite Element Method for Shape Reconstruction of a Wing Structure

Abstract

Abstract Shape sensing technology is the basis for the control system of the adaptive deformation wing. There are various deformation reconstruction methods based on strain information. The inverse Finite Element Method (iFEM) is popular for the advantages of no need to know the structural material and load information. However, iFEM, which mainly uses shell elements, has problems when applied on purely bending beam structures such as large amount of calculation and the waste of more than half of the element’s degrees of freedom. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a beam element-based inverse finite element method. This paper firstly derives the theoretical process of the beam element-based inverse finite element method based on the classical beam bending theory and the least squares variational principle. Then, the proposed method is applied on the main load-bearing structure of the fishbone shape of an adaptive deformable wing. COMSOL is used to calculate the displacement and strain and the FEM strain can be used as the input of the beam element-based inverse finite element method to calculate the reconstruction displacement. At last, the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method are verified by comparing the error of reconstruction and simulation displacement.