Proper Orthogonal Decomposition Technique for Near-Optimal Control of Flexible Aircraft Wings

An Aeroelastic study of a flight vehicle has been a subject of great interest and research. Its importance lies in the achieving better performance, safety operation (e.g. aileron reversal, flutter analysis) and related analysis in the field of aeronautics. Structural dynamics of an aircraft wing characterized by aeroelastic nature is modeled as partial differential equation. The study of these equations comes under distributed parameter system and control design of these systems is very complex as compared to lumped parameter systems defined by ordinary differential equation. In present paper we present a stabilizing state-feedback control design approach for the second order system dynamics which completely represents the heave dynamics of wing-fuselage model. This approach is presented for a class of systems when there is a continuous actuator in the spatial domain. The control methodology is designed by combining the technique of “Proper Orthogonal Decomposition” (POD) and approximate dynamic programming (ADP).