Abstract
Flow separation and dynamic stall occurring at a high angle of attack will lead to difficulty in control and maneuverability for morphing aircraft. This study proposes a novel active flow control technology using a synthetic jet actuator for the roll motion of morphing aircraft. With the help of the computational fluid dynamics method and vortex lattice method, the roll control model of morphing aircraft undergoing large shape change at a high angle of attack is established. In this model, both the array of the actuator with an optimized cavity shape and morphing span, which are subject to the input saturation constraint, are used to mimic the conventional control surface. Integrated flight control based on the sliding mode control method is designed to ensure the desired closed-loop asymptotic stability, wherein the radial basis function neural network is employed to provide the compensation induced by the input saturation constraint. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the control scheme, various control strategies for different combinations of input are proposed to maintain the roll motion. The numerical results show that the designed control law could track the target signal well, which suggests that the virtual control surface is an effective tool for maintaining the high flight performance of morphing aircraft.
Highlights
According to the instantaneous flight state, a morphing aircraft can alter its configuration to achieve a higher fuel-efficiency and maneuverability for multi-role missions, such as long endurance loiter, dash, and high-speed maneuvers [1,2,3,4]
Numerical simulations are conducted to perform the control effect of synthetic jet actuator (SJA) and the morphing span which require that the morphing aircraft follows the desired roll angle command
The dynamic model has been established with a consideration of roll damping, the morphing motion, and aerodynamic fluctuation induced by SJA
Summary
According to the instantaneous flight state, a morphing aircraft can alter its configuration to achieve a higher fuel-efficiency and maneuverability for multi-role missions, such as long endurance loiter, dash, and high-speed maneuvers [1,2,3,4]. The morphing part of an in-plane morphing aircraft, on the other hand, can be considered a control surface to replace an aileron [5]. Shi and Peng adopted the developed Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) to maintain roll control of morphing aircraft and found that the variable-sweepback-based control consumes less energy than approaches using the conventional control surface [14]. To replace the conventional aileron, Ajaj et al used the morphing wing to maintain roll motion over the flight envelope and found that 20% symmetric span morphing is the optimum value for reducing the overall drag [16,17,18,19]. The published studies were mainly focused on flight control via the morphing part at a low angle of attack (AoA), while the situation under a high AoA has not yet been considered
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