Flexible Wing Co-Design with Active Load Alleviation and Control Surface Layout Optimization
Abstract
Designing flexible, high-aspect-ratio wings requires multidisciplinary methods and load mitigation strategies to be tightly coupled from preliminary design. Despite this need, current methodologies are often applied in isolation. Traditional aeroelastic sizing neglects control law synthesis, while load alleviation architectures are evaluated on frozen structures. Furthermore, although recent co-design frameworks explore control surface layout optimization, they either neglect the structural resizing needed to translate load alleviation into mass savings or restrict analyses to isolated wings. This paper introduces two novel aeroservoelastic methodologies that jointly integrate control surface layout optimization, ℋ∞-based Gust Load Alleviation (GLA) and structural wing sizing within a full-aircraft environment. Applied to a regional aircraft, the GLA system with a fixed actuator layout reduces structural wing mass by 8.6\% compared to the passive configuration. The proposed sequential co-design architecture nests the control synthesis within an optimization loop, while the simultaneous architecture integrates layout design into the ℋ∞ synthesis via a Linear Parameter-Varying formulation. By actively driving the optimal surface outboard to roughly 70\% span, both frameworks further alleviate structural loads, achieving a 10.8\% wing mass reduction relative to the passive baseline. Finally, the simultaneous framework mitigates the sequential method's computational cost, reducing required aeroelastic evaluations from 76 to 10.
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BibTeX
@misc{curpanaru2026flexible,
title = {{Flexible Wing Co-Design with Active Load Alleviation and Control Surface Layout Optimization}},
author = {Armand-Ioan Curpanaru and Fabrice Demourant and Eric Nguyen Van and Philippe Pastor},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05795165v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Flexible Wing Co-Design with Active Load Alleviation and Control Surface Layout Optimization
AU - Armand-Ioan Curpanaru
AU - Fabrice Demourant
AU - Eric Nguyen Van
AU - Philippe Pastor
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/20
PB - HAL
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05795165v1
AB - Designing flexible, high-aspect-ratio wings requires multidisciplinary methods and load mitigation strategies to be tightly coupled from preliminary design. Despite this need, current methodologies are often applied in isolation. Traditional aeroelastic sizing neglects control law synthesis, while load alleviation architectures are evaluated on frozen structures. Furthermore, although recent co-design frameworks explore control surface layout optimization, they either neglect the structural resizing needed to translate load alleviation into mass savings or restrict analyses to isolated wings. This paper introduces two novel aeroservoelastic methodologies that jointly integrate control surface layout optimization, ℋ_∞-based Gust Load Alleviation (GLA) and structural wing sizing within a full-aircraft environment. Applied to a regional aircraft, the GLA system with a fixed actuator layout reduces structural wing mass by 8.6\% compared to the passive configuration. The proposed sequential co-design architecture nests the control synthesis within an optimization loop, while the simultaneous architecture integrates layout design into the ℋ_∞ synthesis via a Linear Parameter-Varying formulation. By actively driving the optimal surface outboard to roughly 70\% span, both frameworks further alleviate structural loads, achieving a 10.8\% wing mass reduction relative to the passive baseline. Finally, the simultaneous framework mitigates the sequential method's computational cost, reducing required aeroelastic evaluations from 76 to 10.
ER -