A New Approach for Aeroelastic Robust Stability Analysis

Air vehicles undergo variations in structural mass and stiffness because of fuel consumption and the failure of structural components, which might lead to serious influences on the aeroelastic characteristics. An approach for aeroelastic robust stability analysis taking into account the perturbations of structural mass and stiffness is developed. Applying the perturbation method and harmonic unsteady aerodynamic forces, the frequency-domain linear fractal transformation （LFT） representation of perturbed aeroelastic system is modeled. Then, the robust stability is analyzed by using the structured singular value ,u-method. The numerical results of a bi-spar wing show its effectiveness and low computational time in dealing with the robust problems with mass and stiffness perturbations. In engineering analysis for solving aeroelastic problems, the robust approach can be applied to flutter analysis for airplane with the fuel load variation and taking the damage conditions into consideration.

The μ Method to Robust Stability Analysis

The robust stability of systems under both plant and controller perturbations is analyzed, with an emphasis on additivenorm-bounded perturbation. Choosing the interconnection matrix M makes Δ(s) block diagonal matrices and absorbing any matrix makes ‖Δ(s)‖∞<1, the problem can be recast into a small structured singular value (μ) problem. If 2S + F ≤ 3, μ(M) = infσ(DMD-1). In this paper, the main result is supωμ(M)=‖M‖∞, thus the structured singular value(μ) problem for robust stability of SISO systems subject to additive norm-bounded perturbation, can be recast into H∞ control problem. Moreover, robust stability of MIMO systems can be unified in the same framework.

Methods and advances in the study of aeroelasticity with uncertainties

Uncertainties denote the operators which describe data error, numerical error and model error in the mathematical methods. The study of aeroelasticity with uncertainty embedded in the subsystems, such as the uncertainty in the modeling of structures and aerodynamics, has been a hot topic in the last decades. In this paper, advances of the analysis and design in aeroelasticity with uncertainty are summarized in detail. According to the non-probabilistic or probabilistic uncer- tainty, the developments of theories, methods and experiments with application to both robust and probabilistic aeroelasticity analysis are presented, respectively. In addition, the advances in aeroelastic design considering either probabilistic or non-probabilistic uncertainties are introduced along with aeroelastic analysis. This review focuses on the robust aeroelasticity study based on the structured singular value method, namely the ~t method. It covers the numerical calculation algo- rithm of the structured singular value, uncertainty model construction, robust aeroelastic stability analysis algorithms, uncertainty level verification, and robust flutter boundary prediction in the flight test, etc. The key results and conclusions are explored. Finally, several promising problems on aeroelasticity with uncertainty are proposed for future investigation.

Identification and robust limit-cycle-oscillation analysis of uncertain aeroelastic system

Model uncertainty directly affects the accuracy of robust flutter and limit-cycle-oscillation (LCO) analysis. Using a data-based method, the bounds of an uncertain block-oriented aeroelastic system with nonlinearity are obtained in the time domain. Then robust LCO analysis of the identified model set is performed. First, the proper orthonormal basis is constructed based on the on-line dynamic poles of the aeroelastic system. Accordingly, the identification problem of uncertain model is converted to a nonlinear optimization of the upper and lower bounds for uncertain parameters estimation. By replacing the identified memoryless nonlinear operators by its related sinusoidal-input describing function, the Linear Fractional Transformation (LFT) technique is applied to the modeling process. Finally, the structured singular value(μ) method is applied to robust LCO analysis. An example of a two-degree wing section is carded out to validate the framework above. Results indicate that the dynamic characteristics and model uncertainties of the aeroelastic system can be depicted by the identified uncertain model set. The robust LCO magnitude of pitch angle for the identified uncertain model is lower than that of the nominal model at the same velocity. This method can be applied to robust flutter and LCO prediction.