Buffet Mitigation Control System for High-Performance Aircraft

This paper presents an active control scheme aimed at the mitigation of the buffeting phenomenon on the wing of the high-performance aircraft. Buffeting is a common occurrence in flight where the aircraft undergo sharp turn rates and maneuvers. The high energy flow strikes the wing and the vertical tail of the aircraft and consequently, it excites the aeroelastic modes. The phenomenon of buffeting is modeled for the Finite Element (FE) model of Aluminum Fighter Aircraft (AFA). Buffet loads acquired through flight tests are mapped onto the wing of AFA model through Pade approximation. An accurate description of aeroelastic behavior is acquired in terms of Linear Time Invariant (LTI) state space system. In-house built software MASSA is used to formulate the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system, where the buffet loads serve as the exogenous inputs to the aeroelastic system of the AFA model. The active control scheme based on Static Output Feedback (SOF) is used to actively control the ailerons. Two aileron deflection strategies optimized by the heuristic algorithm are proposed and compared in the presented research: firstly, the results are presented for the actuator which produces the deflection directly proportional to the excited disturbance and termed here as unconstrained movement, then an optimized strategy for aileron deflection is presented in which deflection is energy efficient with a compromise is made on the attenuation of the excited modes.