Optimisation of Controlled Aeroelastic Systems

Abstract

This project presents and investigates a methodology for the optimisation of control systemsand structural parameters of aeroelastic systems, which enables a rapid acquisition of designcriteria with low computational costs.The aerolastic system is modelled via a set of non-linear intrinsic beam equations for thestructure together with a two-dimensional model for the unsteady aerodynamics. The sys-tem’s number of degrees of freedom is truncated by a modal reduction while maintainingthe relevant physical information for the optimisation process. The aerolastic system hasbeen verified through a comparison of the flutter dynamics with benchmark results. Anadjoint sensitivity analysis is then performed to extract the derivatives of a cost function,for instance the strain energy during a gust perturbation, with respect to some paramet-ers of interest such as the weights of a PID-type controller or the wing’s mass distribution,to be applied to a gradient-based optimisation and find a minimum of this objective function.This methodology, which has been implemented with MATLAB, is very flexible and canbe easily applied to different cost functions as well as optimisation paramete