Gust load alleviation with active flutter suppression: design, simulation, and tests

Complex aeroelastic phenomena, such as gust response and flutter, pose significant challenges to aircraft design by reducing efficiency, degrading flight quality, and generating structural loads and instabilities with the potential for failure. This paper presents the development, implementation, and experimental study of active control strategies, including linear quadratic Gaussian, model predictive control (MPC), and MPC with disturbance preview, for gust load alleviation (GLA) and active flutter suppression (AFS). A major goal is to investigate the benefits of disturbance preview and the influence of preview-related design parameters on GLA and, subsequently, to evaluate the integration of the developed control strategies in flutter-prone systems, aiming to suppress aeroelastic instabilities while mitigating gust-induced effects. The study is carried out at the University of Washington’s low-speed wind tunnel facility, using a flexible half-wing–body–tail aeroservoelastic model (MARGE-I) and a gust generation system. The tests demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies, achieving significant reductions in peak loads as well as improved stability margins, validating the applicability of the designed controllers in realistic scenarios. This work contributes to advancing the state-of-the-art in active control of aeroelastic systems. New insights regarding the synthesis and performance of aeroelastic MPC controllers are gained. The findings have implications for the design and optimization of future aircraft, paving the way for safer and more efficient aerospace systems.