Suppression of the Aeroelastic/Aeroservoelastic Interaction Using Adaptive Feedback Control Instead of Notching Filters

This paper investigates the possibility that an adaptive feedback controller can be designed and implemented for the suppression of aircraft’s structural vibration in the presence of any aeroelastic/aeroservoelastic interaction, instead of using the non-adaptive notching filters. Currently aircraft with non-adaptive control laws usually include roll-off or notch filters to avoid AE/ASE interactions. However, if changes in the aircraft configuration are significant, the frequencies of the flexible modes of the aircraft may be shifted and the notch filters could become totally ineffective. With the proposed adaptive feedback control technology, the flexible dynamics can be consistently estimated via system identification algorithms and its undesirable effects are suppressed through a robust feedback control law, while the whole systems stability is being maintained. The proposed feedback control technique is demonstrated with a 6-DOF nonlinear F/A-18 AAW model for the suppression of the aeroelastic/aeroservoelastic interaction.