Aeroservoelastic design of piezo-composite wings for gust load alleviation

In this study, aeroservoelastic design of piezo-composite wings is performed to minimize gust responses. The wing structure is modeled as a composite thin-walled beam featuring fiber-reinforced host structure and piezo-actuators whose anisotropic characteristics are accounted. In addition, doublet-lattice method and rational function approximation technique are integrated to establish the aeroservoelastic model. State feedback H-infinity controllers are synthesized for different wing configurations in order to assess the closed-loop effectiveness. Numerical results demonstrate that the gust load alleviation performance is sensitive to the piezo-actuator ply-angle, namely of that the gust response can be effectively suppressed for the wing configuration with appropriate ply-angle.