Section: Application Domains

Turbulent flow control for aircrafts and vehicles

Non-A is active in a Regional consortium gathering micro-technologies (ONERA, IEMN, LAMIH, LML and PPrime lab, Univ. of Poitiers) which aims at developing methods for active control of separated flows (ContrATech subprogram of CPER ELSAT).

Aerodynamic losses are believed to be a major source of energy wastage for a vehicle at speeds higher than 50 km/h. Optimization of the vehicles shapes has reached its limit and such a passive control approach cannot deal with unsteady incoming flow. Similarly, in aeronautics, controlling boundary layer airflow could reduce stall drastically. In such contexts, active control strategies (air blowers, hot film sensors, etc.) are very attractive. But the natural phenomena ruling turbulent flows lead to highly nonlinear and infinite-dimension dynamics. Till now, researchers use either nonlinear PDEs (Navier-Stokes equations) allowing for analysis but improper for control design or unrealistic linear finite-dimension models for classical $-$ but non robust $-$ control. Non-A first wants to propose a model with intermediate complexity (bilinear with time delays, “grey-box” identification on experimental data) and then develop model-based sliding mode and optimal control algorithms.