Control law design for transonic aeroservoelasticity

Existing computational transonic aeroservoelastic researches focus on directly coupling the structural dynamic equations, CFD solver and servo system in time domain, study the effect of the given feedback control laws on the responses of the aeroelastic system. These works have not involved the design of the flutter active control law. The non-linearity of transonic flow brings great difficulties to aeroservoelastic analysis and design. Recent research of the unsteady aerodynamic reduced order models (ROM) based on CFD provides a challenging approach for transonic aeroservoelastic analysis and design. Coupling the structural state equations with the aerodynamic state equations of the wing and the control surface based on the ROM, we construct a transonic acroservoelastic model in state-space. Then the sub-optimal control method based on output feedback is used to design the flutter suppressing law. The study first demonstrates the open loop of the Benchmark Active Controls Technology (BACT) wing. The computational results of the CFD direct simulation method and the ROM analysis method are both agree well with the experimental data. Then both the closed loop time responses and the flutter results by ROM technique are compared with those of numerical aeroservoelastic simulation based on Euler codes to validate the correctness of the design method of the control law and aeroservoelastic analysis method. An increase of up to 20% of the speed index can be achieved by the control law designed by sub-optimal control method for this model. (c) 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.