Computational Analysis of the Active Control of Incompressible Airfoil Flutter Vibration Using a Piezoelectric V-Stack Actuator

The flutter phenomenon is a potentially destructive aeroelastic vibration studied for the design of aircraft structures as it limits the flight envelope of the aircraft. The aim of this work is to propose a heuristic design of a piezoelectric actuator-based controller for flutter vibration suppression in order to extend the allowable speed range of the structure. Based on the numerical model of a three degrees of freedom (3DOF) airfoil and taking into account the FEM model of a V-stack piezoelectric actuator, a filtered PID controller is tuned using the population decline swarm optimizer PDSO algorithm, and gain scheduling (GS) of the controller parameters is used to make the control adaptive in velocity. Numerical simulations are discussed to study the performance of the controller in the presence of external disturbances.