Adaptive aeroelastic control of nonlinear airfoil with multiple flaps under unsteady flow

In this paper, a fully adaptive control design is considered for a four-degree-of-freedom aeroelastic system that has structural nonlinearities and operates in an unsteady aerodynamic incompressible flowfield. By using the flap hinge torque of a trailing-edge flap surface in combination with a leading-edge active flap, a closed-loop controller that adapts for uncertainties in the system parameters is designed. An implicit observer is implemented in the control design to compensate for lack of measurements of the lag states that model the unsteady flow. The innovative Lyapunov-based control design procedure results in a partial-state feedback adaptive controller that is globally asymptotically stable. Numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the control strategy; comparative simulations are run to illustrate the benefit of using twin flaps as opposed to the conventional single flap control design.