1 Active Control for Flutter Suppression: An Experimental Investigation

This paper describes an experimental study involving the implementation of the method of receptances to control binary flutter in a wind-tunnel aerofoil rig. The aerofoil and its suspension were designed as part of the project. The advantage of the receptance method over conventional state-space approaches is that it is based entirely on frequency response function measurements, so that there is no need to know or to evaluate the system matrices describing structural mass, aeroelastic and structural damping and aeroelastic and structural stiffness. There is no need for model reduction or the estimation of unmeasured states, for example by the use of an observer. It is demonstrated experimentally that a significant increase in the flutter margin can be achieved by separating the frequencies of the heave and pitch modes. Preliminary results from a complementary numerical programme using a reduced-order model, based on linear unsteady aerodynamics, are also presented