A Gain Scheduling Control of Incompressible Airfoil Flutter Tuned by the Population Decline Swarm Optimizer—PDSO

The phenomenon of flutter is a self-excited aeroelastic vibration which can occur on flexible aerodynamic structures moving within a fluid domain, whereby the structure absorbs energy from the fluid; this phenomenon is related to variations in configuration with respect to the relative wind that the structure undergoes as a consequence of its oscillations. Based on the aeroelastic model of a three-degree-of-freedom airfoil, an adaptive controller for flutter suppression is designed and investigated in this work. A population decline swarm optimization PDSO is used to find the optimal parameters of the controller to set a gain scheduling approach to make the control adaptive in velocity. The integral of time absolute error is minimized to attribute a greater weight to the divergence error that can manifest far after the disturbing instant. Numerical results are reported to show how the gain scheduling control allows to obtain damped oscillation beyond the critical speed without destructive picks.