In recent years, combat aircraft with external stores have experienced a decrease in their mission capabilities due to lack of robustness of the current passive wing/store flutter suppression system to both structured as well as unstructured uncertainties. The research program proposed here is to investigate the feasibility of using a piezoceramic wafer actuator for active control of store flutter with the goal of producing a robust feedback system that demonstrates increased performance as well as robustness to modeling errors. This approach treats the actuator as an active soft-decoupling tie between the wing and store, thus isolating the wing from store pitch inertia effects. Advanced control techniques are used to assess the nominal performance and robustness of wing/store system to flutter critical uncertainties.

NOTE: (10/2009) An updated copy of this ETD was added after there were patron reports of problems with the file.