Perturbation evaluation of dynamic behavior of a class of elastic vehicles

By employing a new mathematical tool called pertubation and evaluation theory for matrix eigenvalue, we analyze the influence of unsteady aerodynamics on the dynamic behavior of a slender flight vehicle system. Thus we obtain the first order perturbation solutions of system eigenvalues and also obtain the upper and lower bounds of the error of approximation. The digital calculations of this paper's numerical example show that the proposed method is accurate and effective for estimating the dynamic behavior of the elastic vehicle system from the vehicle model considering only quasisteady aerodynamic force under certain conditions as explained in the paper; the relative error of the perturbation solution with respect to the accurate solution is less than 10%.