Date of Award

Summer 2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Director

Brett Newman

Committee Member

Chuh Mei

Committee Member

Drew Landman

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E535 Y66 2008

Abstract

A challenging problem in flight control system design for highly maneuverable aircraft is the coordinated control of the lateral-directional axes. Design goals are based on desired flying qualities giving an indication of whether the response to pilot inputs will be acceptable. Satisfying these closed-loop design objectives employing a computerized flight control system requires multiple feedback and crossfeed paths which operate in a well coordinated fashion. Contemporary control design tools, which close all loops simultaneously, have addressed this problem for several decades. Concerns associated with these strategies are the complicated mathematical relationships between the designer inputs and resulting closed-loop properties, and the lack of information about the role and fw1ction of individual feedback loops or gains. From these downsides, understanding of how the aircraft's dynamics are augmented by the controller is limited and, if modifications to the flight control system are needed, corrective steps to follow are unclear. Further, these tools lack the rich graphical nature associated with conventional control techniques. Development of a computerized flight control design tool based on a new multivariable framework incorporating both gain and phase root locus concepts. is the aim of this thesis. The new tool generates gain and phase root locus plots for the closed-loop poles and the closed-loop zeros for all transfer functions associated with a two-channel, bi-directional crossfeed system. This thesis illustrates the use of the combined gain and phase concepts for controller design to to achieve the desired objectives. The tool was used successfully to design a lateral-directional flight control system.

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DOI

10.25777/pthc-9976

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