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...

Manifold Learning of Nonlinear Airfoil Aerodynamics with Dimensionality Reduction

This paper aims to explore the advantages offered by machine learning (ML) for dimensionality reduction of nonlinear transonic aerodynamics. Three ML techniques are evaluated in terms of their ability to generate interpretable low-dimensional manifolds of the transient pressure distributions over a NACA4412 airfoil equipped with a flap. These ML...

Discrete-time Design and Stability Analysis for Nonlinear Incremental Fault-tolerant Flight Control

Incremental control, including incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) and incremental backstepping (IBS), is a sensor-based control framework that enhances the control robustness by exploiting sensor measurements. Although its effectiveness has been demonstrated on various aerospace systems, the explicit and quantifiable expression for...

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...

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...

Development of an Active Aeroelastic Parametric Wing Apparatus

This paper presents the development and initial characterization of an active, para- metric wing section with aileron and spoiler control surfaces. This wing section is intended to replace the currently used passive wing section setup and facilitate research in active con- trol techniques of aeroelastic phenomena such as flutter, gust load...

Incremental Nonlinear Control for Aeroelastic Wing Load Alleviation and Flutter Suppression

This paper proposes an incremental nonlinear control method for aeroelastic sys- tem gust load alleviation and active flutter suppression. These two control objectives can be achieved without modifying the control architecture or the control parameters. The proposed method has guaranteed stability in the Lyapunov sense and also has robustness...

Preliminary aeroelastic design of composite wings with distributed electric propulsion

In the development of electric aircraft, the use of distributed electric propulsion introduces a potential occurrence of propeller whirl flutter, which needs to be taken into account for wing structural design. To this end, this work extends an in-house aeroelastic optimization tool by means of including a post-processing procedure on whirl...

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:...

The Effects of Aeroelastic Tailoring on Flight Dynamic Stability

This paper presents a unified framework for aeroelastic tailoring of free-flying aircraft with composite wings. A continuous-time state-space model is used to describe the flow. The 3D composite wing structures is condensed into a Timoshenko beam model by means of a cross-sectional modeler. The aerodynamic and structural models are closely...

Flexible Aircraft Gust Load Alleviation with Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

In this paper, an Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) controller is<br/>developed for the flexible aircraft gust load alleviation (GLA) problem. First, a flexible aircraft model captures both inertia and aerodynamic coupling effects between flight dynamics and structural vibration dynamics is presented. Then an INDI GLA controller is...