MUSYN Inc — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: Adaptive control offers an opportunity to fulfill present and futureaircraft safety object

Description

Adaptive control offers an opportunity to fulfill present and futureaircraft safety objectives though automatedvehicle recovery while maintaining performanceand stability requirements in the presence of unknown orvarying operating environment.Future aircraft are a natural application of adaptive control. Theseaircraft will be more fuel efficient, have longer operating ranges thoughmore flexible aircraft structures. Thisincreased flexibility will result in structural modes being in thesame frequency range as the rigid body modes. The traditionalnon-adaptive control design approach to address the aeroservoelastic (ASE)interaction of decoupling the rigid body and structural dynamicswill not work. Furthermore, the application of adaptive controlto these flexible aircraft may result inundesired ASE excitationleading to structural damage or failure. Hencean integrated flight control system is needed for gust loadalleviation, flutter suppression and rigid body control of theaircraft which works in concert with the adaptive control systemfor improved resilience and safety.MUSYN proposes an integrated approach based on linear, parameter-varying(LPV) control to the design of theflight control, load alleviation and flutter suppression algorithms.The Phase I and Phase II research will focus on applying andextending LPV techniques to model, design, analyze andsimulate control algorithms for flexible aircraft.The objective is to combine the integratedLPV flight control system with adaptive control topreserve rigid body performance during upsets while retaining the loadalleviation and flutter suppression characteristics of thenominally augmented aircraft.Phase I will develop a prototype LPV framework for modeling, analysis,control and simulation and Phase II will develop a comprehensiveLPV software tool suite.