Nonlinear aeroservoelasticity of aircraft

Abstract

Advanced flight vehicles have been requiring lightweight structures and the expansion of bandwidth and authority of control systems. Hence, the coupled dynamics of the unsteady aerodynamics, the flexible aircraft structure, and the active control system has been an important research field in dynamics and control. The community of aeronautical technology has paid much attention to the aeroelastic stability and active control of aircraft since 1980s, but made less efforts to study the effects of the aerodynamic and structural nonlinearities, as well as time delays in a control loop, on the aeroservoelastic behaviors of aricraft. The studies of these effects need to model the high-dimensional and parametric-varying dynamic systems with strong aerodynamic/structural nonlinearity, and hence, face with the coupling among unsteady aerodynamics, aircraft structure, and active control system. The cutting-edge problems include how to develop nonlinear aeroservoelastic modeling theory, to reveal the dynamic mechanism behind the induced aeroelastic vibrations and to carry out wind tunnel tests for aeroservoelasticity. This review article surveys the recent advances in reduced modeling of unsteady aerodynamics, nonlinear structural dynamics, design of aeroservoelastic control law, and expremental studies on aeroservoelastic systems, with an emphasis on the researches of the authors’ team in nonlinear aeroservoelasticity. The article also makes a number of suggestions for studies in future.