Closed-loop model validation techniques for health monitoring of aeroservoelastic systems

To ensure flight safety, extensive flight-testing and active structural servo control strategies are required to explore and expand the boundary of a flight envelope. Aeroservoelastic (ASE) models can provide online flight monitoring of dynamic instabilities to reduce flight time testing and increase flight safety. The reliability of an ASE model for the flight envelope prediction and flight safety monitoring is determined by several factors. These factor show that it is beneficial to use models that are developed on the basis of experimental data in order to improve reliability and that an accurate nominal model is crucial to describe the relevant nominal flight behavior. It has also been shown that the parameterization and characterization of the model perturbation is necessary to predict/monitor allowable perturbations in the nominal flight behavior.