Digital Adaptive Flutter Suppression and Simulation Using Approximate Transonic Aerodynamics

A digital adaptive controller, using a trailing edge control surface, is introduced for the active flutter suppression of wings undergoing time varying flight conditions. The aeroservoelastic system is modeled in the time domain by a deterministic Auto Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) model together with a parameter estimator. Linear quadratic controller gains at each time step are obtained using an iterative Riccati solver. Aeroservoelastic transient response is obtained using Roger's approximation, state transition matrices, and an iterative time marching algorithm. Simulations of system performance for flights into the transonic speed regime are used to demonstrate suppression of flutter and divergence instabilities.