| Scope and method of study. Battle damages and/or generic failures are the cause of many accidents involving the loss of aircraft. In this study particular approaches for three tasks of the overall flight control system reconfiguration problem are considered. These tasks are: damaged model estimation, reconfiguration law design and feedback structure redesign.; Findings and conclusions. First, the estimated model of the damaged aircraft is obtained by using a Multiple Model Kalman Filtering approach. Then, a particular algorithm is applied to the flight control reconfiguration. The determination of the desired control law, which can adapt in a very short period of time to a major damage on a main control surface, is obtained by making use of the recent control and response time histories. Furthermore, a particular approach is proposed in order to calculate a new set of feedback gains of the flight control system such that dynamic uncoupling and desirable handling qualities are retained even after the damage. The model estimation, the control algorithm and the feedback gains updating process have been codified in computer simulation programs for a 6 degrees of freedom aircraft model. The simulation results of the reconfiguration are presented. |
