Study on gust alleviation control and wind tunnel test

Abstract

Aircraft are inevitably affected by gust during flight, which disturbs the regular operations of pilots and worsens the ride quality. In more grievous cases, flight mission cannot be completed and the flight safety may be disserved. In order to improve the ride quality and the fatigue life of the plane structure under the affect of gust, it is necessary to explore and validate the gust alleviation schemes. Through the low-speed wind tunnel test, the gust alleviation active control technology applied to elastic aircraft is studied. For a large-type passenger plane configuration with high aspect ratio wing, a test system was designed and three gust alleviation control schemes with PID controllers were proposed. Finally the gust alleviation control low-speed wind tunnel test was carried out in the FD-09 wind tunnel. Test results showed that at certain speed and gust frequency, all of the 3 control schemes can alleviate the acceleration at fuselage and wing-tip to a certain extent, as well as the bending moment of wing-root. The gust alleviation control scheme, which uses aileron, elevator and canard as control surfaces synthetically, gives the most satisfying gust alleviation effect.