Aeroelastic analysis and active flutter suppression of an electro-rheological sandwich cylindrical panel under yawed supersonic flow

Supersonic flutter control of a three-layered sandwich curved panel of rectangular plan form with an adaptive electro-rheological fluid (ERF) core layer is investigated. The panel is excited by an arbitrary transient transverse load along with an arbitrary airflow yaw angle. The problem formulation is based on Kirchhoff–Love thin shell theory, the first order Kelvin–Voigt viscoelastic material model, and the linear quasi-steady Krumhaar's modified supersonic piston theory that accounts for both the panel curvature and flow yaw angle. The classical Hamilton's principle and the Galerkin method are used to set up the equations of motion which are then put in the state-space form. The effects of applied electric field, panel aspect ratio, panel shallowness angle, and airflow direction on the critical free stream static pressure are studied. Also, the aeroelastic response of the cylindrical panel excited by an impulsive central point load is calculated using the Runge–Kutta time integration scheme. Subsequently, a Sliding Mode Control (SMC) methodology is implemented to actively attenuate the structural response in the supersonic flow regime. Numerical simulations establish the effectiveness of the applied control configuration in successful suppression of the structural oscillations. The validity of results is demonstrated by rigorous comparisons with the existing data.