Active suppression of an 'apparent shock induced instability'

A control law was designed, using constrained optimization techniques, to suppress an apparent shock induced instability of a sweptback, aeroelastic wing with supercritical airfoil sections. The controller design was based on an approximate linear plant representation obtained using forced response data from a previous entry in the Langley Transonic Dynamics tunnel. During a second tunnel entry, it was found that there was not an instability in the uncontrolled case but there was a region of very low damping (high dynamic response) near a Mach number of 0.92. Controller performance was obtained during the test in near real-time and revealed that the controller attenuated the open-loop response and provided a small but significant amount of damping over a Mach number range from M = 0.70 to M = 0.92.