Adaptive control of nonlinear aeroelastic response of a two-dimensional airfoil

The question of active flutter control of an aeroelastic airfoil with leading- and trailing-edge control surfaces is investigated. The dynamical equations of a two-dimensional airfoil with polynomial nonlinearity in pitch are established. Then suppose that there are parametric uncertainties in both pitch stiffness and damping; Lyapunov function is used to design an adaptive control law of feedback linearization and a structured model reference adaptive control law. The simulation results and their analysis show preliminarily that: (1) the nonlinear controllers are effective for flutter suppression even if the control surface deflection is limited; (2) considering damping uncertainty has positive effect on reducing the convergence time but stiffness uncertainty plays the leading role for flutter control.