This airfoil is one of many components that will be used to study the correlation of free-play in control surfaces on aircraft and flutter. Aeroelastic flutter is a phenomenon in which an airfoil will tend to oscillate with a combination of torsion and bending . Flutter is undesirable because is generally a divergent property meaning that once it has started, it can lead to a catastrophic failure if it is not properly dampened. As aircraft exist today, there is no method of dampening these oscillations. Aeroelastic flutter caused the famous Tacoma Narrows bridge to collapse into the water below in 1940 [1].
This airfoil is separated into 8 segments and is held together by a central spar. The airfoil is segmented to reduce the torsional and bending stiffness of the structure. This is important because it reduces the wind tunnel velocity required to induce fluttering.
[1] http://www.ketchum.org/billah/Billah-Scanlan.pdf
