A Design Procedure and Handling-Quality Criteria for Lateral-Directional Flight Control Systems.

摘要

The program develops a practical design procedure for aircraft augmentation systems based on quadratic optimal control technology and handling-quality-oriented cost functionals. The procedure is applied to the design of a lateral-directional control system for the F4C aircraft. The design criteria,design procedure,and final control system are validated with a program of formal pilot evaluation experiments. These use 5 x 2 x 3mixed-design analysis of variance. A reformulated optimal model-following control problem is used as the cornerstone for the procedure. Design criteria are expressed as model differential equations satisfying available handling-quality data. The reformulation includes optimality over multiple flight conditions and constant gain and measurement realizability constraints. A computational algorithm is developed to solve the new optimization problem. The algorithm successfully handled 20th-order F4C lateral-axes dynamics and optimized five flight conditions simultaneously. The results of the validation experiments were fully positive with strong correlation between performance and pilot opinion data. (Author)