Fault‐Tolerant Control for Flutter of Airfoil Subject to Input Saturation

In this paper, a fault tolerant control is studied for a two‐dimensional airfoil with input saturation and actuator fault. The dynamic equation of airfoil flutter is firstly established, in which the cubic hard spring nonlinearity of pitch stiffness is considered. Then, an adaptive sliding mode fault tolerant control is derived by using an on‐line updating law to estimate the bound of the actuator fault such that no information about the fault is needed. Furthermore, an auxiliary design system is introduced to resolve actuator saturation in control. Next, Lyapunov stability analysis is carried out to prove that the system is asymptotically stable. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified through numerical simulations. Simulation results indicate that the adaptive sliding mode fault tolerant controller is effective in suppressing airfoil flutter under partial loss of actuator effectiveness performance and input saturation.