The sliding mode control for an airfoil system driven by harmonic and colored Gaussian noise excitations

•A new stochastic two-degree-freedom airfoil (TDOFA) model was established.•A stochastic jump phenomenon was observed and effects of the colored noise were included.•A sliding mode control of the stochastic TDOFA system was investigated.•Based on the practical stability, the stability of the controlled stochastic TDOFA system was analyzed. This paper addresses a sliding mode control (SMC) for an airfoil model excited by a combination of harmonic force and colored Gaussian noise. Firstly, to reveal effects of random factors, the airfoil model with colored Gaussian noise is established. Next, via a perturbation technique and the stochastic averaging method, an analytical expression for the time-averaging mean square response is derived, which agrees well with results by Monte Carlo simulations. Additionally, we uncover that colored noise can induce a stochastic jump phenomenon, which can cause a catastrophic structural failure of the airfoil or even a disintegration of the aircraft. Subsequently, the SMC strategy is employed to design an effective controller for suppressing such a jump phenomenon of the stochastic airfoil system. In the case of the proposed stochastic airfoil system, we introduce concepts of ultimately reachability with an arbitrary small bound and a mean square practical stability to realize the reachability of the sliding mode and the stability of the system state. Finally, several numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SMC algorithm. We show that the jump phenomenon can be suppressed efficiently to avoid a catastrophic failure of the wing structure due to large deformation/deflection, and the energy cost is discussed to analyze the SMC approach.