Test demonstration of digital control of wing/store flutter

Abstract

Methods of digital control have been applied to a demonstration of the suppression of wing/store flutter. Digital control laws were developed by applying a modified Jordan canonical transformation to a state variable formulation of a control law synthesized originally for an analog system. A real-time simulation of the components of the control system served to develop the concepts. This was followed by a wind-tunnel demonstration which evaluated the system in detail. The results of the test showed that the performance of the digital controller was comparable to that of analog controllers. Attention during the test was focused on the insertion of adequate antialiasing filters, the effects of sample time, and the compensation for phase lags introduced by the digital control process.