Practical Methods For Aircraft And Rotorcraft Flight Control Design

Reducing the theoretical methods of flight control to design practice, Practical Methods for Aircraft and Rotorcraft Flight Control Design: An Optimization-Based Approach compiles the authors' extensive experience and lessons learned into a single comprehensive resource for both academics and working flight control engineers.

Annotation Bridging the gap between academic research and real-world applications, this reference on modern flight control methods for fixed-wing aircraft deals with fundamentals of flight control systems design, then concentrates on applications based on the modern control methods used in the latest aircraft. The book is written for practicing engineers who are new to the aviation industry, postgraduate students in strategic or applied research, and advanced undergraduates. Some knowledge of classical control is assumed. Pratt is a member of IEEE and is UK Member for AIAA's Technical Committee on Guidance, Navigation and Control. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This book provides a single comprehensive resource that reviews many of the current aircraft flight control programmes from the perspective of experienced practitioners directly involved in the projects. Each chapter discusses a specific aircraft flight programme covering the control system design considerations, control law architecture, simulation and analysis, flight test optimization and handling qualities evaluations. The programmes described have widely exploited modern interdisciplinary tools and techniques and the discussions include extensive flight test results. Many important `lessons learned' are included from the experience gained when design methods and requirements were tested and optimized in actual flight demonstration.

A state-of-the-art computational facility for aircraft flight control design, evaluation, and integration called CONDUIT (Control Designer's Unified Interface) has been developed. This paper describes the CONDUIT tool and case study applications to complex rotary- and fixed- wing fly-by-wire flight control problems. Control system analysis and design optimization methods are presented, including definition of design specifications and system models within CONDUIT, and the multi-objective function optimization (CONSOL-OPTCAD) used to tune the selected design parameters. Design examples are based on flight test programs for which extensive data are available for validation. CONDUIT is used to analyze baseline control laws against pertinent military handling qualities and control system specifications. In both case studies, CONDUIT successfully exploits trade-offs between forward loop and feedback dynamics to significantly improve the expected handling qualities and minimize the required actuator authority. The CONDUIT system provides a new environment for integrated control system analysis and design, and has potential for significantly reducing the time and cost of control system flight test optimization.

Although many books have been written on the theory of system identification, few are available that provide a complete engineering treatment of system identification and how to successfully apply it to flight vehicles. This book presents proven methods, practical guidelines, and real-world flight-test results for a wide range of state-of-the-art flight vehicles, from small uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) to large manned aircraft/rotorcraft.