Nonlinear flutter of a two-dimension thin plate subjected to aerodynamic heating by differential quadrature method

The problem of nonlinear aerothermoelasticity of a two-dimension thin plate in supersonic airflow is examined. The strain-displacement relation of the von Karman’s large deflection theory is employed to describe the geometric non-linearity and the aerodynamic piston theory is employed to account for the effects of the aerodynamic force. A new method, the differential quadrature method (DQM), is used to obtain the discrete form of the motion equations. Then the Runge–Kutta numerical method is applied to solve the nonlinear equations and the nonlinear response of the plate is obtained numerically. The results indicate that due to the aerodynamic heating, the plate stability is degenerated, and in a specific region of system parameters the chaos motion occurs, and the route to chaos motion is via doubling-period bifurcations. The project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10576024). The English text was polished by Keren Wang.