Adaptive Control of Post-Stall Separated Flow Application to Heavy Vehicles

This paper discusses two adaptive feedback control approaches designed to reattach a massively separated flow over a NACA airfoil with minimal control effort using piezoelectric synthetic jet actuators and various sensors for feedback. One approach uses an adaptive feedback disturbance rejection algorithm in conjunction with a system identification algorithm to develop a reduced-order dynamical systems model between the actuator voltage and unsteady surface pressure signals. The objective of this feedback control scheme is to suppress the pressure fluctuations on the upper surface of the airfoil model, which results in reduced flow separation, increased lift, and reduced drag. A second approach leverages various flow instabilities in a nonlinear fashion to maximize the lift-to-drag ratio using a constrained optimization scheme – in this case using a static lift/drag balance for feedback. The potential application of these adaptive flow control techniques to heavy vehicles is discussed.