Damage-Mitigating Predictive Control of Airfoil Flutter for a General Hypersonic Flight Vehicle

This paper aims to investigate the airfoil flutter damage-mitigating problem in hypersonic flow. A new adaptive robust nonlinear predictive control law is designed in this paper to mitigate the damage during airfoil flutter of a generic hypersonic flight vehicle. A three-degrees-of-freedom airfoil dynamic motion model is established, in which the third piston theory is employed to derive the unsteady aerodynamics. Then, the complicated responses of the hypersonic airfoil flutter model are analyzed. In order to mitigate the damage of the airfoil, a predictive controller is designed by introducing an adaptive predictive period, and asymptotical stability analysis of the robust nonlinear predictive controller is performed. Subsequently, based on the nonlinear aerodynamics of the airfoil and damage accumulation model, the damage of the airfoil is observed online. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.