Design of active flutter suppression and wind-tunnel tests of a wing model involving a control delay

In this study, a delayed controller was designed for active flutter suppression of a three-dimensional wing model. The design of controller can be divided into two steps. At the first step, a short time delay was artificially introduced into the control loop and the dynamic equations of the aeroelastic system with delayed control were converted into a set of delay-free state-space equations by using a state transformation. At the second step, the control law was synthesized by using the theory of optimal control for the delay-free state-space equations. To demonstrate the performance of the delayed controller, the margin of time delay was studied. The numerical results showed that the delayed controller had good robustness with respect to the time delay. Moreover, the delayed controller was digitally implemented and tested for the three-dimensional wing model in NH-2 subsonic wind-tunnel. The experimental results illustrated that the critical flow speed of flutter instability of the wing model could be effectively increased from 36.5 m/s to 39 m/s. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.