Active Control of Forward-Swept Wings with Divergence and Flutter Aeroelastic Instabilities

Abstract : Active feedback control is applied to cantilever forward-swept wings (FSW) providing significant increases in the critical airspeeds of aeroelastic flutter and divergence. Feedback compensation improves the critical airspeed for a divergence critical FSW by 25% and improves the critical airspeed for a flutter critical FSW example by 30%. These improvements are limited by the emergence as most critical, instabilities that were only secondary without feedback. The method of analysis is linear control theory in the Laplace domain. A significant improvement is made in the Pade Approximant method for calculating damped unsteady aerodynamic forces in the Laplace domain. Keywords: Aeroelasticity, Swept forward wings, Aerodynamics, Feedback control. (Theses)