Flight Control System Design For The Cruise Segment Of Small Morphing Wing Aircraft

The main thesis work is to design a flight control system(FCS) of a small morphing wing aero vehicle(SMWAV) manufactured in the author’s lab, aiming to make it fly by route during the cruise segment.Firstly, a dynamic model of the SMWAV is constructed. The reason for using the model form of a rigid aeroplane is explained. The aerodynamic coefficients are determined through flight experiment and software calculation. An accurate trim condition is solved out using a 6DOF flight model, the preciseness of the trim result is proved by comparing experiment results. The longitudinal and lateral state space equations benchmarked against trim point is built. Dynamic response of the non-control perturbation motion is analyzed.Secondly, aiming to the control demands of SMWAV during cruise segment, general structure of the FCS is set. The control loop for each FCS’s subsystem is provided. Parts in transfer function forms representing dynamic process in the control loop is obtained by flight dynamic model, followed by controller coefficient based on the demands of dynamic response. Thus the control law in each channel of SMWAV is designed.A trajectory simulation program is made in MATLAB Simulink. Some simulations are conducted based on the program to validating the effectiveness of the designed control law when facing the channel-coupling nonlinear dynamic model. Simulation results of transfer-function-based SISO loop and 6 DOF –model-based MIMO loop are compared.Finally, the control law of SMWAV is realized by constructing an embedded system. General structure of the hardware and software is designed, along with the detailed designs including the type selection of hardware components and code programming of software modules. A flight experiment using a model plane with the same-scale of SWMAV is conducted to test the rationality and effectiveness of the embedded FCS.