ECCOMAS 2024

UPWing Gust Load Alleviation Wind Tunnel Experiment: Overview on Controller Design Activities, Pt. 2

  • Stalla, Felix (German Aerospace Center - DLR)
  • Kier, Thiemo (German Aerospace Center - DLR)
  • Vuillemin, Pierre (ONERA - French Aerospace Lab)
  • Wang, Xuerui (Technical University Delft)
  • Senger Franco, Ralf (Technical University Berlin)

Please login to view abstract download link

The UPWing project investigates wing technologies to be used on a next generation short and medium range transport aircraft. One promising technique is active load alleviation. To mature load control techniques a wind tunnel experiment is conducted within UPWing WP2.3. Based on a reference configuration, a wing wind tunnel model is developed, featuring sweep and high aspect ratio. In the experiment, a gust generator introduces disturbances in the airflow, which then interact with the flexible wing, exciting its dynamics. The motion is sensed by distributed acceleration sensors, load estimators, and a (virtual) LIDAR. These measurements are provided as feedback / feedforward signals to the control algorithms to be designed. Three trailing edge control surfaces allow to reduce the loads resulting from the gust encounter. The numerical model presented in Part 1 of this shared presentation is used in model-based controller design. The controllers are synthesized using the linear state-space model of reduced order. The validation of the controllers is performed in the nonlinear MATLAB-Simulink environment. Aim of the gust load alleviation control is to reduce the integral loads at the wing-root, while ensuring local loads at more outboard spanwise locations are not significantly increased. Multiple control strategies will be examined by different partners. These include: - Robust control using µ-synthesis and H-inf struct, - Incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI), - Output feedback with and without state estimation. Each control strategy is applied to multiple test scenarios. The baseline features distributed acceleration sensors as feedback variables. In a second case, the feedback from the wind tunnel balance can be interpreted as a load estimation. A third case uses feedforward signals as they would be supplied by a LIDAR system or angle of attack sensor. An important feature in all controllers to be tested experimentally is sufficient robustness. This poses a great challenge in the UPWing wind tunnel experiment, as the freestream velocity is similar to the one that a full aircraft would experience at cruising altitude, while the scale of the wing is approximately one-sixteenth of the full wing. This leaves very little time to react to a gust interacting with wing. Dead time in hardware must be reduced, and a focus in the design of the controllers lies on achieving a good trade-off between robustness and performance.