Optimal Control for Distributed Aeroelastic Morphing Structure with Uncertainties and Imperfections

This research takes a further step towards the development of an autonomous aeroservoelastic wing concept with distributed flaps. The wing demonstrator, developed within the TU Delft SmartX project, aims to demonstrate in-flight performance optimization and multi-objective control using an over-actuated wing design. To address the challenges...

Black-Box Online Aerodynamic Performance Optimization for a Seamless Wing with Distributed Morphing

Vision-Based Nonlinear Incremental Control for A Morphing Wing with Mechanical Imperfections

Morphing structures have acquired much attention in the aerospace community because they enable an aircraft to actively adapt its shape during flight, leading to fewer emissions and fuel consumption. Researchers have designed, manufactured, and tested a morphing wing named SmartX-Alpha, which can actively alleviate loads while achieving the...

Black-box Online Aerodynamic Performance Optimization for a Seamless Wing with Distributed Morphing

Morphing is a promising bio-inspired technology, with the potential to make aircraft more economical and sustainable through adaptation of the wing shape for best efficiency at any flight condition. This paper proposes an online black-box performance optimization strategy for a seamless wing with distributed morphing control. Pursuing global...

Aeroelastic Wing Demonstrator with a Distributed and Decentralized Control Architecture

This study investigated the design and development of an autonomous aeroservoelastic wing concept with distributed flaps. This wing demonstrator was developed in the scope of the SmartX project, aiming to demonstrate in-flight performance optimization and multi-objective control with over-actuated wing designs. Following a successful test...

Nonlinear incremental control for flexible aircraft trajectory tracking and load alleviation

This paper proposes a nonlinear control architecture for flexible aircraft simultaneous trajectory tracking and load alleviation. By exploiting the control redundancy, the gust and maneuver loads are alleviated without degrading the rigid-body command tracking performance. The proposed control architecture contains four cascaded loops:...

On-Line Black-Box Aerodynamic Performance Optimization for a Morphing Wing With Distributed Sensing and Control

Inspired by nature, smart morphing technologies enable the aircraft of tomorrow to sense their environment and adapt the shape of their wings in flight to minimize fuel consumption and emissions. A primary challenge on the road to this feature is how to use the knowledge gathered from sensory data to establish an optimal shape adaptively and...

Overview of the SmartX Wing Technology Integrator

This article describes the challenges of integrating smart sensing, actuation, and control concepts into an over-sensed and over-actuated technology integrator. This technology integrator has more control inputs than the expected responses or outputs (over-actuated), and its every state is measured using more than one sensor system (over-sensed)...

Nonlinear Incremental Control for Flexible Aircraft Trajectory Tracking and Load Alleviation

This paper proposes a nonlinear control architecture for flexible aircraft simultaneous trajectory tracking and load alleviation. By exploiting the control redundancy, the gust and maneuver loads are alleviated without degrading the rigid-body command tracking performance. The proposed control architecture contains four cascaded control loops:...

Seamless Active Morphing Wing Simultaneous Gust and Maneuver Load Alleviation

This paper deals with the simultaneous gust and maneuver load alleviation problem of a seamless active morphing wing. The incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion with quadratic programming control allocation and virtual shape functions (denoted as INDI-QP-V) is proposed to fulfill this goal. The designed control allocator provides an optimal...

Design and Real-Time Implementation of a Vision-Based Adaptive Model-Free Morphing Wing Motion Control Method [PPT]

The advancements made in aircraft control methodology and the tendency towards increasingly lighter aircraft structures open the opportunity to higher structural performance and aerodynamic efficiency. However, with the reduction of structure weight, the structure stiffness reduces typically, which makes the structure more susceptible to...