Adverse aeroelastic interaction is a problem on aircraft of all types causing repeated loading, enhanced fatigue, and catastrophic flutter. Traditional approaches to aeroelastic suppression that use notch and roll-off filters are generally not robust to off nominal behavior, and resulting phase penalty degrades rigid body performance. An alternative approach has been developed and refined: Modal Isolation and Damping for Adaptive Aeroservoelastic Suppression (MIDAAS). This distributed sensor and effector feedback control technique determines optimal input and output blends that effectively isolate and damp problematic lightly damped (and possibly unstable) modes. The result is a zeroth-order controller with many inputs and outputs that has minimal impact on aircraft rigid body performance, and results in virtually no low-frequency phase penalty, thus not effecting independently-designed primary flight controllers. In this work, a robust MIDAAS controller was developed and applied to a small flexible aircraft with highly-coupled rigid body and flexible aeroelastic dynamics that is susceptible to body freedom flutter. MIDAAS is shown to be an excellent flutter suppression solution due to its robustness to aircraft velocity variation. Additionally, ground-based hardware-in-the-loop validation of MIDAAS was performed on the actual test aircraft, displaying successful suppression of adverse structural response.
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