Fuel-efficient flight control design for a hypersonic airliner

The determination of realistic flight mission characteristics, such as fuel consumption and flight time, requires fuel-optimal flight trajectories where the vehicles total trip fuel converges to a minimum. Within the Stratospheric Flying Opportunities for High-Speed Propulsion Concepts research project, one of the main challenging factors is the design of artificial flight controllers for maintaining 4D fuel-optimal trajectories for the STRATOFLY MR3 vehicle. In this paper, we propose a continuous climb cruise (CCC) flight controller as well as a zoom dive (ZD) flight controller which are derived using Feedback Linearization and embedded in a MATLAB-based trajectory simulation program. This incorporates the establishment of a proper control design model, an aircraft state estimator and the limitation of the plants control inputs to ensure a bounded fast-time, forward integration of all aircraft state variables based on a 3 degrees of freedom point-mass model. Simulation results are presented showing that the CCC controller is primarily used in the hypersonic cruise phase - covering the main flight segment of MR3 - and that the ZD controller is used in the transonic region (while the vehicle reaches Mach 1), both ensuring a total decay of 2.98 % in the vehicles fuel consumption for a reference flight mission from Brussels to Sydney.

Schlagworte

STRATOFLY

Flight control

Feedback linearization

Trajectory simulation

Trajectory optimization

DDC Class

600: Technik

620: Ingenieurwissenschaften

Projekt(e)

Stratospheric Flying Opportunities for High-Speed Propulsion Concepts

Funding Organisations

European Union

More Funding Information

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
under grant agreement No 769246 within the Stratospheric Flying Opportunities for High-Speed Propulsion Concepts (STRATOFLY) Project.

Options

Fuel-efficient flight control design for a hypersonic airliner