Active Flutter Suppression: Quantification of Performance Loss Due to Actuator Saturation

Abstract

Active flutter suppression technologies have the potential to lead to major weight savings while keeping the envisaged flight envelope for the future generation of commercial aircraft. Since the stabilization of aeroelastic systems undergoing flutter instabilities is strongly affected by actuators’ characteristics and delays in the closed loop, the degradation of closed-loop performance due to actuators’ nonlinearities must be thoroughly understood. Comparisons between the region of attraction and the controllable region can support the quantification of performance loss due to common actuators’ nonlinearities, such as amplitude and rate limits. At first, this paper illustrates a numerically robust algorithm for the full characterization of the controllable region of a generic unstable system under input amplitude and rate constraints. Secondly, the concept of region of attraction is expanded to assess the boundedness of the closed-loop response in the presence of input saturation and atmospheric disturbances. These concepts are here employed to define two nonlinear performance measures that quantify the performance loss due to actuators’ saturation in an unstable aeroelastic system stabilized by a flutter suppression controller. The approach is demonstrated on a realistic aeroelastic system for which different H2 and H∞ output feedback controllers are synthesized to augment the damping of the critical flutter mode.