RESPONSE OF AN AIRPLANE TO NON-GAUSSIAN ATMOSPHERIC-TURBULENCE

We study the influence of the atmospherical turbulence model on the response of a flexible airplane with nonlinear control systems. Using a new method based on filtered Poisson fields in order to build numerical simulations of non-Gaussian random fields, we show that the spectral density of the response, as well as other statistics such as level crossings or probabilistic moments, may be very different from the ones obtained when turbulence is modeled as a Gaussian process. The results presented in this work illustrate the effects of the turbulence third- and fourth-order moments.