Co-Design of the Aeroelastic Wing Parameters and the Flutter Control Law

In an aircraft design process, the initial airframe design is iteraively refined going back and forth between structural and control design. Instead of this iteration, the simultaneous optimization of the structure and the control laws would be advantageous. This paper presents a co-design for a flutter suppression controller for a simple rectangular flexible wing. The wing is parametrized by seven geometric and structural variables. The controller is based on output feedback, whose parameters are simultaneously optimized with the structure. A solution to the same co-design problem was already proposed by Filippi et. al. (2018) [1] by directly synthesizing the optimal control input along with the optimal parameters. In this paper, a solution is presented for the design of a control law instead of the control signals. The paper uses the model parameterization by Filippi to achieve comparable results. The behavior of the wing is evaluated by time domain simulations. The objective of the co-design method takes into consideration the maneuverability, comfortability, and control cost of the wing for two types of wind gusts. The results prove that the output feedback, instead of the optimal control inputs created by Filippi optimization, works more efficiently in a co-design framework. Thus, the sensorbased flutter suppression is successfully applicable for co-design purposes.