Aeroelastic scaling laws for gust load alleviation control system

Gust load alleviation (GLA) tests are widely conducted to study the effectiveness of the control laws and methods. The physical parameters of models in these tests are aeroelastic scaled, while the scaling of GLA control system is always unreached. This paper concentrates on studying the scaling laws of GLA control system. Through theoretical demonstration, the scaling criterion of a classical PID control system has been come up and a scaling methodology is provided and verified. By adopting the scaling laws in this paper, gust response of the scaled model could be directly related to the full-scale aircraft theoretically under both open-loop and closed-loop conditions. Also, the influences of different scaling choices of an important non-dimensional parameter, the Froude number, have been studied in this paper. Furthermore for practical application, a compensating method is given when the theoretical scaled actuators or sensors cannot be obtained. Also, the scaling laws of some non-linear elements in control system such as the rate and amplitude saturations in actuator have been studied and examined by a numerical simulation.