LPV modeling and controller design for body freedom flutter suppression subject to actuator saturation

Abstract

In recent years, the Active Flutter Suppression (AFS) employing Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) framework has become a hot spot in the research field. Nevertheless, the flutter suppression technique is facing two severe challenges. On the one hand, due to the fatal risk of flight test near critical airspeed, it is hard to obtain the accurate mathematical model of the aeroelastic system from the testing data. On the other hand, saturation of the actuator may degrade the closed-loop performance, which was often neglected in the past work. To tackle these two problems, a new active controller design procedure is proposed to suppress flutter in this paper. Firstly, with the aid of LPV model order reduction method and State-space Model Interpolation of Local Estimates (SMILE) technique, a set of high-fidelity Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) models which are usually derived from flight tests at different subcritical airspeeds are reduced and interpolated to construct an LPV model of an aeroelastic system. And then, the unstable aeroelastic dynamics beyond critical airspeed are ‘predicted’ by extrapolating the resulting LPV model. Secondly, based on the control-oriented LPV model, an AFS controller in LPV framework which is composed of a nominal LPV controller and an LPV anti-windup compensator is designed to suppress the aeroelastic vibration and overcome the performance degradation caused by actuator saturation. Although the nominal LPV controller may have superior performance in linear simulation in which the saturation effect is ignored, the results of the numerical simulations show that the nominal LPV controller fails to suppress the Body Freedom Flutter (BFF) when encountering the actuator saturation. However, the LPV anti-windup compensator not only enhances the nominal controller’s performance but also helps the nominal controller to stabilize the unstable aeroelastic system when encountering serious actuator saturation.