Control of Aeroelastic Structures Based on a Computational Reduced Order Modeling Method
Charles Hindman, University of Colorado
Many modern aeroelastic structures suffer from design and performance limitations caused by aeroelastic instabilities such as flutter. Existing stability augmentation techniques using controllers designed from highly simplified aerodynamic models or system ID type approaches suffer from robustness issues cause by the low fidelity models used in design. A new approach to controller design using recent ideas from reduced order modeling (ROM) theory is introduced in this research. This approach forms high fidelity reduced order models directly from highly accurate, large order, parallel nonlinear aeroelastic computational simulations. The resulting ROMs are then used as a basis for the controller design problem. This model reduction approach is developed and implemented on high order 1, 2, and 3 dimensional aeroelastic problems and compared to other existing ROM techniques. Controllers based on the ROM created are used to show the robustness of the controlled system exposed to a wide variety of flight conditions.
Abstract Author(s): Charles Hindman