Tensor-Product-Model-Based Control of a Three Degrees-of-Freedom Aeroelastic Model

Active control of aeroelasticity has been in the focus of aerospace and control engineering for several decades.An introduction to this topic can be found in [1].This paper largely focuses on the three degrees-of-freedom (DoF) Nonlinear Aeroelastic Test Apparatus (NATA) model.The NATA model with unsteady aerodynamics was presented in [2, 3] and several active controllers were developed in [414].LPV control of an improved three DoF aeroelastic model is discussed in [15].The aim of this paper is to propose a control design strategy to stabilize the improved 3 DoF NATA model presented in [15], as well as to stabilize the NATA model with nonlinear friction.It is assumed that only the free stream velocity and the pitch angle are measurable, thus an output feedback control structure is applied.The control design considers the following performance requirements: asymptotic stability, decay rate and constraint on the control signal, which are formulated in terms of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs).The proposed control design strategy has two main steps.First, the quasi linear parameter varying (qLPV) NATA model is transformed into Tensor Product (TP) type polytopic form via TP model transformation ([1618]).LMI based control design is applied to the TP type polytopic form in the second step, which yields in stabilising controller and observer via optimising the control performance.Besides resulting in a stabilising control solution to the 3 DoF NATA model, it is shown that