When designing an airfoil, how do you take into consideration the flexing of an airplane wing? Does it change depending on the length of the wind?
I didn’t find much on this in Prof. Kirby’s reference materials.
The short answer is you are usually assuming the flex of the wing is not significant when you do the aerodynamic design, and then you design the wing to have structural stiffness enough to make that correct.
Backward-swept wings are much more stable, and pose a simpler aeroelastic problem, which is a big reason why wings are swept back.
Some things to be wary of include static instability (divergence) or dynamic instability (flutter) – cases in which the aerodynamic forces lead to a bending action that then increases the force, leading to instability.