Design and Experimental Validation of Hamiltonian Control for Gust Load Alleviation and Flutter Suppression of a High Aspect Ratio Flexible Transport Wing

This paper presents the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of a Hamiltonian based control strategy for gust load alleviation (GLA) and flutter suppression on a high-aspect ratio transport wing model. The wing, based on a NASA Common Research Model variant (CRM13), was instrumented with distributed control surfaces and an array of sensors, including strain gauges and accelerometers, and tested in the NASA Langley Transonic Dynamics Tunnel. A full-order aeroservoelastic model was reduced for control design under the assumption sinusoidal steady-state response at a single frequency. The Hamiltonian framework provides a systematic approach for deriving state-feedback gains that guarantee dissipativity, with additional integral action incorporated through a linear-quadratic integral (LQI) control law. State estimation is performed using an extended Kalman filter for unmeasured structural and disturbance states. Experimental results demonstrate effective attenuation of wing root strain for multiple gust frequencies, and suppression of lightly damped flutter modes up to Mach 0.72. The study highlights the practical application of Hamiltonian control in aeroservoelastic systems and validates its effectiveness for both gust load alleviation and flutter suppression in a
wind-tunnel environment.