Jacob Brown

In this paper, conic-sector-based control methods are applied to a small-scale two-dimensional simulated airfoil to introduce new methods of suppressing aircraft flutter. Flutter occurs when external aerodynamic forces and vibrations match the natural frequency of the aircraft wing's structure forcing the wing's angle of attack to increase uncontrollably. If not damped quickly and properly, the wing's angle of attack will increase in oscillations causing catastrophic structure failure. A dynamic model of an airfoil with a flap is considered with a torque applied directly to the wing-fuselage lug, where the control objective is to track and suppress the wing's angle of attack. This model setup leads to a direct relationship between the torque input and the wing's angle of attack output. Numerical simulations of this research have shown that using the conic-sector-theorem with a variety of controllers will successfully control and diminish aircraft flutter from occurring. Specifically, H2 and SPR controllers were primarily used to verify these results. Further research showed that implementing gain scheduling into these conic-sector-based controllers allowed for more stable, reliable, and quicker suppression of aircraft flutter at any velocity. From these findings, conic-sector-based control methods can be applied to effectively and efficiently suppress aircraft flutter as well as successfully be utilized on real life applications.