Active Camber Control of Flexible Airfoils using Artificial Hair Sensors

摘要

Wing flexibility can be proactively exploited in high-performance aircraft, where wing configurations are designed to be adaptive to different flight conditions and missions. Nonetheless, the shape change of flexible wings has to be controlled by a robust mechanism and algorithm. The wing flexibility itself may cause a delay between the control input and the wing response. In this paper, a simplified aeroelastic model is introduced that considers the traditional rigid-body motions, as well as the camber deformation of flexible airfoils. With the applied camberwise load as the control input, shape and vibrations of flexible airfoils are controlled using the concept of artificial hair sensors, where the aerodynamic loads that can be measured by the sensors are used in the control development. This algorithm is tested on a flexible airfoil with the conformal camber change capability for its alleviation of external gust perturbations.