Design and Integration of a Dual Redundancy Air Data System for Unmanned Air Vehicles

摘要

Air data systems measure airspeed, pressure altitude, angle of attack and angle of sideslip. These measurements are essential for operating flight control laws to ensure safe flights. Since the loss or corruption of air data measurements is considered as catastrophic, a high level of operational reliability needs to be achieved for air data systems. In the case of unmanned air vehicles, failure of any of air data sensors is more critical due to the absence of onboard pilot decision aid. This paper presents design of a dual redundancy air data system and the integration process for an unmanned air vehicle. The proposed dual-redundant architecture is based on two independent air data probes and redundancy management by central processing in two independent flight control computers. Starting from unit testing of single air data sensor, details are provided of system level tests used to meet overall requirements. Test results from system integration demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed process.