Robust Modal Filtering for Control of Flexible Aircraft

Abstract

me invaluable advice and contributed to my work. My foremost and sincere appreciation goes to Dr. Dimitri Mavris, my thesis advisor for his course corrections and thoughtful input which shaped my dissertation. Special thanks to Mr. Steve Jacobson, Branch Chief of NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC), who inspired the thesis concept. Gratitude is owed to Mr. Martin Brenner for confirming that the modal filtering approach was mathematically sound from the beginning. I would like to acknowledge thesis committee members Dr.

Flight path reconstruction filter extension for tracking flexible aircraft modal amplitudes and velocities

“…In addition to aeroelastic modelling, tracking the aircraft structural deformation is also important for applications such as structural health monitoring and active control for load and gust alleviation, drag reduction or flutter suppression [3]. For this reason, in literature many approaches have been explored to track the aircraft wing deflections, shape or the state of the whole structure.…”

“…These can be either directly integrated into a displacement estimate, converted into modal amplitudes using strain modes or combined with a Finite Element Method (FEM) model to obtain a fit of the wing shape [4][5][6]. These strain sensors need to be integrated to the structure and many measurement points and/or an accurate FEM model are required to achieve good tracking [3]. A nonintrusive alternative is to use camera based solutions that estimate deformations by tracking markers placed on the wings [7][8][9].…”

“…However, when using only cameras, the tracking accuracy can be greatly influenced by lighting and visibility conditions and obtaining high sampling rates is challenging. For this reason, recent studies have also explored using a combination of different sensors such as accelerometers+cameras [10], gyroscopes+cameras [11], accelerometers+gyroscopes [12] or accelerometers+strain gauges [3] to reconstruct the structural deformations.…”