Aeroservoelastic Modeling and Robust Control for Gust Load Alleviation of an Experimental Wing

Kurzfassung

Active gust load alleviation is a promising technique to reduce the structural weight of flexible transport aircraft wings with high aspect ratio, ensuring lower fuel consumption and environmental impact. The challenge is to develop a controller that is not only performant, but also robust, since the aircraft's environment cannot fully be captured within a computational model. Robust control is well suited to address this challenge by including uncertainties within the controller design. This paper describes using µ-synthesis to develop a gust load alleviation controller for a flexible wing, to be tested in a wind tunnel experiment. The wing features both sweep and high aspect ratio. Five trailing edge control surfaces are installed for active load alleviation. Distributed acceleration sensors provide measurements for feedback control. The paper details the entire controller development, starting with the creation of an aeroservoelastic plant, using the Loewner framework as a novel addition to model the gust disturbance. After controller synthesis, the designed controller is validated in a nonlinear simulation, constituting a virtual representation of the wind tunnel experiment.