Aeroservoelastic design optimization of flexible wings

The structure/control design optimization of a large aspect-ratio wing considering aeroservo- elastic characteristics as constraints and objects is presented. The wing has a two-spar structure and an active control surface for gust response alleviation. On the basis of the aeroservoelastic analytic model, the mathe- matical model of the optimization problem is formulated. The structural stiffness and control parameters are chosen as the design variables, divergence and flutter are defined as the constraints, and the combined performance of structural weight and gust response are defined as the object function. The genetic algorithm is applied to perform the optimization process. The results show that the optimal wing has lighter weight and remarkable improvement in gust response compared with the baseline wing model.