Smooth-switching LPV control for vibration suppression of a flexible airplane wing

Abstract In this paper, active vibration suppression of a Blended-Wing-Body flexible airplane wing is studied by utilizing a smooth-switching linear parameter-varying (LPV) dynamic output-feedback control. For the reduced-order LPV models, developed for each divided flight envelop subregion, a family of mixed Input Covariance Constraint and H ∞ LPV controllers are designed to robustly suppress the wing bending displacement using hard-constrained control surfaces, while achieving smooth-switching between adjacent controllers. The proposed LPV controllers are developed by minimizing a combination of weighted H 2 output performance and smoothness index, subject to a set of Parametric Linear Matrix Inequalities derived from stability and performance conditions. In addition, the weighting coefficient in the cost function is tuned to balance between H 2 performance and switching smoothness by iteratively solving convex optimization problems. Simulation results demonstrate that simultaneous smooth-switching and improved performance can be achieved by the proposed LPV control.