Control Oriented Reduced Order Modeling of a Flexible Winged Aircraft

This paper presents a systematic framework for developing a dynamical model for flexible aircrafts, which is suitable for model-based control design. Traditional modeling tools, such as Finite Element (FEM) and Doublet Lattice Method (DLM) are used for developing a detailed model, which captures the entire behavior of the aircraft. However, the dimension and complexity of the model exceed the currently available computational need of model-based control design. Consequently, a model order reduction framework has been developed and applied for the high fidelity representation. The paper is the first reported results on reducing a 524 dimensional dynamical aircraft model. The main focus is to preserve the information relevant for control design, e.g., the flutter phenomena. From this viewpoint, the final 35 dimensional model shows encouraging results, as shown in the paper.