DESIGN AND INTEGRATION OF FLEXI BIRD-A LOW COST SUB-SCALE RESEARCH AIRCRAFT FOR SAFETY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

摘要

This paper is focused on aircraft design, systems and systems integration. The main goal of this activity is to prove that IEP (Innovative Evaluation Platform) - called also Flexi_Bird - can be successfully used in research of environmental issues and safety of passenger airplane flight. Aircraft design philosophy, structure, on-board systems and preparation to free flight experiments will be presented in details. Flexi-Bird is outfitted with high-quality instrumentation and prepared to register the control input, and to measure the aircraft output including hazardous states of flight (simulation of emergency) and response to brutal control. An array of microphones is planed to be set-up on ground to measure the noise coming from different aircraft components. Flight data will be fully stored on-board and partly transmitted to the ground control station for analysis. Most of systems were customized, tailored to Flexi- Bird structure and research tasks to be performed, including the autopilot widely tested with Matlab/ Simulink software. Extensive testing of all on-board systems was performed in Stuttgart University using the so-called "Iron Bird" and presented in a global overview.