Adaptive Control of a Flexible Wing for Flutter Suppression and Disturbance Rejection

Abstract

This paper investigates the application of direct adaptive control to suppress the aeroelastic response of a flexible wing model for a range of flight conditions, including pre- and post-flutter airspeeds, while also subject to unmodeled nonlinearities such as nonlinear structural stiffness and actuator free-play. A three-dimensional aeroelastic wing is developed in which the structural dynamics are modeled using a three-dimensional extension of a typical aeroelastic section by mode shape weighting. The aerodynamic forcing is incorporated via an unsteady vortex lattice method. Nonlinear structural stiffness and actuator free-play models are developed and incorporated into the aeroelastic model as well as exogenous disturbances, such as continuous turbulence and discrete gust models. A direct adaptive control strategy is employed that takes the form of an adaptive regulator in which the feedback gain represents the adaptive augmentation of a baseline linear quadratic regulator (LQR) that is designed using the linear aeroelastic model at a pre-flutter flight condition. Simulation studies are presented to evaluate the performance of the adaptive controller in comparison to the baseline LQR controller for a range of flight conditions and with the inclusion of a torsional structural nonlinearity and actuator free-play. The results show that the adaptive controller provides improved attenuation of the linear aeroelastic model as the airspeed increases past the flutter point. In addition, for the case where torsional nonlinearity is included, the adaptive controller is able to stabilize the aeroelastic response at the flutter speed whereas the closed-loop response using the baseline LQR controller is unstable.