As wing designs aim for higher aerodynamic efficiency, the underlying aircraft structure becomes more flexible, requiring additional features to alleviate the loads encountered from gusts and maneuvers. While alleviating loads, it is desirable to minimize the deviations from the original flight trajectory. In this work, a dynamic control allocation method that exploits redundant control effectors for maneuver and gust load alleviation is proposed for flexible aircraft. The control architecture decouples the two objectives of load alleviation and rigid-body trajectory tracking by exploiting the null space between the input and the rigid-body output. A reduced-dimensional null space input is established, which affects the flexible output (but not the rigid-body output) when passed through a null space filter to generate incremental control signals. This null space input is determined by model predictive control to maintain the flexible output of the aircraft within specified values, thereby achieving load alleviation. Numerical simulations are used to illustrate the operation of this load alleviation system on nonlinear models. It is shown that the proposed load alleviation system can successfully avoid the violation of load bounds in the presence of both gust disturbances and maneuvers with minimal effect on the trajectory tracking performance.

由于机翼设计旨在提高空气动力学效率，因此底层飞机结构变得更加灵活，需要额外的功能来减轻阵风和机动所遇到的载荷。在减轻负载的同时，希望最小化与原始飞行轨迹的偏差。在这项工作中，提出了一种动态控制分配方法，该方法利用冗余控制效应器进行机动和阵风载荷缓解，用于柔性飞机。通过利用输入和刚体输出之间的零空间，控制架构将减轻负载和刚体轨迹跟踪这两个目标解耦。建立了一个降维的零空间输入，当通过零空间滤波器生成增量控制信号时，它会影响柔性输出（但不影响刚体输出）。这种零空间输入由模型预测控制确定，以保持飞行器的灵活输出在规定值内，从而实现负载减轻。数值模拟用于说明该减载系统在非线性模型上的操作。结果表明，所提出的负载减轻系统可以成功地避免在存在阵风扰动和机动的情况下违反负载边界，而对轨迹跟踪性能的影响最小。