Nonlinear Adaptive Control and Guidance for Unstart Recovery for a Generic Hypersonic Vehicle

This work presents the development of an integrated flight controller for a generic model of a hypersonic air-breathing vehicle. The flight control architecture comprises a guidance and trajectory planning module and a nonlinear inner-loop adaptive controller. The emphasis of the controller design is on achieving stable tracking of suitable reference trajectories in the presence of a specific engine fault (inlet unstart), in which sudden and drastic changes in the vehicle aerodynamics and engine performance occur.;First, the equations of motion of the vehicle for a rigid body model, taking the rotation of the Earth into account, is provided. Aerodynamic forces and moments and engine data are provided in lookup-table format. This comprehensive model is used for simulations and verification of the control strategies. Then, a simplified control-oriented model is developed for the purpose of control design and stability analysis.;The design of the guidance and nonlinear adaptive control algorithms is first carried out on a longitudinal version of the vehicle dynamics. The design is verified in a simulation study aiming at testing the robustness of the inner-loop controller under significant model uncertainty and engine failures. At the same time, the guidance system provides reference trajectories to maximize the vehicle's endurance, which is cast as an optimal control problem. The design is then extended to tackle the significantly more challenging case of the 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) vehicle dynamics. For the full 6-DOF case, the adaptive nonlinear flight controller is tested on more challenging maneuvers, where values of the flight path and bank angles exceed the nominal range defined for the vehicle. Simulation studies show stable operation of the closed-loop system in nominal operating conditions, unstart conditions, and during transition from sustained scramjet propulsion to engine failure mode.