Robust Flutter Suppression and Wind-Tunnel Tests of a Three-Dimensional Wing

Abstract

In this study, a novel reduced-order scheme is proposed to model the airspeed and the air density uncertainties of an aeroelastic system. Based on the present reduced-order scheme, the dimensions of uncertainties could be significantly reduced through separating the quadratic term of airspeed into the linear terms. Based on the proposed scheme, two robust controllers, i.e., a single-input/single-output controller and a multi-input/multioutput controller, were designed to suppress the flutter instability of the aeroelastic system. To illustrate the performance of the designed robust controllers, a three-dimensional multiple-actuated wing was chosen as the test case. The numerical results show that the flutter instability can be effectively suppressed. Besides the numerical investigations, the wind-tunnel tests for active flutter suppression were also implemented to further verify the performance of the robust controllers. The experimental results showed that the present robust controllers could effectively suppress the flutter instability and expand the flutter boundary of the multiple-actuated wing.