Design of optimal wing maneuvers in a transverse gust encounter through iterated simulation or experiment

Wing–gust encounters cause harmful lift transients that can be mitigated through maneuvering of the wing. This paper presents a method to generate an open-loop (i.e., prescribed) maneuver that optimally regulates the lift on the wing during a transverse gust encounter. Obtaining an optimal maneuver is important for laboratory experiments on the physics of wing–gust interactions and may be useful for the future design of feedback controllers. Prior work of the authors has shown that an Iterative Maneuver Optimization (IMO) framework can generate an optimal maneuver by using a surrogate model to propose a control signal that is then tested in experiment or high-fidelity simulation. The input to the surrogate model is updated to account for differences between the test data and the expected output. The optimal maneuver is obtained through iteration of this process. This paper simplifies the IMO method by replacing the surrogate model with the classical lift model of Theodorsen, removing the process of optimization over the surrogate model, and removing the requirement to know the time-averaged profile of the gust. The proposed method, referred to as Simplified IMO (SIMO), only requires input and output data collected from simulations or experiments that interact with the gust. Numerical simulations using a Leading Edge Suction Parameter modulated Discrete Vortex Model are presented to generate the input and output data of the wing–gust encounters for this paper. Experiments in a towing tank also validated the SIMO method. The results show an optimal pitch maneuver and an optimal plunge maneuver that can each regulate lift during a transverse gust encounter. Graphical abstract