Gang Tao, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, has released a new research monograph in control theory, Nonlinear Actuators for Flight Control Applications.Springer published the book in 2022 as part of its Studies in Systems, Decision and Control series.
Tao's Ph.D. students are the first and second authors: Dipankar Deb, professor of electrical engineering at the Institute of Infrastructure, Technology, Research and Management in Gujarat, India, and Jason Burkholder, president and chief executive officer of SoftWright, LLC, a Charlottesville-based company that develops and markets RF system design tools for government and industry applications. Funding from NASA and U.S. Air Force supported the team's work leading to the book.
“We wanted to use control theory-based intelligent algorithms to make the actuator actively compensate its uncertainty to increase its precision,” Tao said.
Modern actuators play an important role in the latest fighter aircraft requiring increasing demands of unnatural maneuvers and flight at higher angles of attack. However, such actuators have inherent and uncertain nonlinearities that need to be adaptively compensated to improve the closed-loop aircraft flight control performance.
“Our book provides several effective mechanisms to achieve this objective, focusing on a type of nonlinear actuators called synthetic jet actuators,” Deb said.
The team investigated adaptive algorithms for controlling such actuators which are embedded into the aircraft wing and have tiny holes on the wing surface. “The change of air jet in and out the actuator holes can make the aerodynamic forces on the aircraft surface change, equivalent to a mechanical actuator,” Tao said. “The adaptive control system decides the amount of air jet and can adapt to the actuator uncertainties through active learning, to generate the desired aerodynamic forces to control the aircraft.”
Nonlinear Actuators for Flight Control Applications adds to the strong portfolio of technical books in cyber-physical systems, control and robotics published by faculty of UVA's Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.