Electro-aeromechanical modelling and feedback control of actuated membrane wings

Abstract

© 2015, by the American Institute.This paper presents a numerical investigation on the potential for unsteady aerodynamic control on integrally-actuated membrane wings made of dielectric elastomers (DEs). They combine the advantages of membrane shape adaptability, which produces increased lift and delayed stall, with the benefits of simple, lightweight but high-authority control mechanism offered by integral actuation. High-fidelity numerical models have been developed to pre­dict their performance and include a fluid solver based on the direct numerical integration of the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations, an electromechanical constitutive material model and a non-linear three-dimensional membrane structural model. Numerical results show that harmonic actuation of 5.0 kV gives an overall increase in the aerodynamic efficiency a fixed wing configuration the wing of up to 6.0%, measured as the lift-to-drag ratio. In addition, the definition of a reduced order model based on POD modes of the complete high-fidelity system allows the synthesis of a feedback control system to obtain on-demand aerodynamic performance