Strategy for robust gust response alleviation of an aircraft model

The aeroelastic response to time-dependent gusts or turbulence should be considered in airplane design. A robust generalized predictive control law for gust response alleviation is designed and simulated on an aircraft model by using the real wind tunnel response and approximated gust input. Based on the open-loop response of an aircraft model at different test conditions, a nominal Auto Regressive (AR) model with parameter uncertainty is identified. Singular Value Decomposition is designed to reduce the dimension of the uncertainty matrix. Afterwards, with the identified online aeroelastic model and its uncertainty, a robust generalized predictive control (GPC) is applied to alleviate the wing tip acceleration at all test conditions, including varying flow velocities and varying gust frequencies. Finally, the alleviation effect of gust response at different test conditions is estimated based on the comparison of simulated closed-loop acceleration with an experimental open-loop one. The comparison indicates that after robust gust response alleviation control, the wing tip acceleration response can be reduced by up to 70% under all test conditions. Remarkably, the control law is robust to the parameter uncertainties and input uncertainties, which is applicable to the gust alleviation wind tunnel test.