Global Robust Control of an Aeroelastic System Using Output Feedback

Abstract

A EROELASTIC systems exhibit a variety of phenomena including instability, limit cycle, and even chaotic vibration. Researchers in aerodynamics, structures, materials, and control have made interesting contributions to the analysis and control of aeroelastic systems [1]. Readers may refer to an excellent article by Mukhopadhyay [2] for the analysis and control of aeroelastic systems. A benchmark active control technology (BACT) windtunnel model has been designed at the NASA Langley Research Center and control algorithms for flutter suppression have been developed [3–5]. At Texas A&Ma 2-degrees-of-freedom aeroelastic model has been developed and tests have been performed in a wind tunnel to examine the effect of nonlinear structural stiffness, and control systems have been designed using linear control theory, feedback linearizing technique, and adaptive control strategies [6– 10]. Based on the Euler–Lagrange theory, control of an aeroelastic model has been considered [11]. The state variable and output feedback designs of [8–10] are based on adaptive control techniques. The synthesis of adaptive controllers is not simple because a large number of parameters must be updated in the dynamic feedback loop. It is also well known that unmodeled dynamics of the system can cause parameter divergence and instability in the closed-loop system. Therefore, it is interesting to design nonadaptive control systems for uncertain aeroelastic models which can be synthesized relatively easily. The contribution of this paper lies in the design of a robust control system for the global regulation of an aeroelastic system which describes the plunge and pitch motion of a wing. The model has polynomial type structural nonlinearity and only the pitch angle is measured for feedback. It is assumed that all the system parameters are unknown to the designer, but the bounds on uncertainties are known. For the purpose of design, afirst-order dynamic compensator is introduced and a “chained” structure of the aeroelastic model including the dynamic compensator is obtained by an appropriate coordinate transformation. Then using the Lyapunov stability theory, a control law for robust output regulation of the transformed system including the compensator is derived. In the closed-loop system, the controller accomplishes global robust stabilization of the aeroelastic system and system trajectories converge to the origin. Simulation results for various flow velocities and elastic axis locations are obtainedwhich show that the control system is effective in flutter suppression in spite of the large parameter uncertainties. An attractive feature of this control system lies in its simplicity from the point of view of implementation.