Optimal Sensor Placement for Vibration Control of a Flexible Aircraft Wing

This paper studies the placement of sensors to achieve optimal vibration suppression for a flexible BWB (Blended-Wing-Body) airplane wing. For a given flight speed range, vibration behaviors of the wing structure are evaluated by guaranteed H
₂
performance of the closed-loop system with the Hρ LPV controller. Candidate sensor locations are identified on each wing, and the optimal sensor placements are found by globally searching through all possible combination over those candidate locations. With the LPV modeling of a flexible wing and H
₂
controller synthesis conditions, simulation results provide the optimal sensor locations for a given number of sensors. In addition the trade-off between optimal system performance and number of sensors can also be attained.