Modern aircraft flight control (Q1210786)

This book must be considered as one more in the field of theoretical engineering than in applied mathematics. Its contents consists of problems, models and engineering design techniques. Practically speaking no theorems are proved even if some results are formulated as theorems. The book consists of 5 chapters: 1. Generalities on Automatic Flight Control. 2. Complete Model of Aircraft Perturbed Motion. 3. Nominal Aircraft Dynamics. 4. Stabilization of Nominal Motion. 5. Application of Dynamic Flight Control to Realization of Aircraft Spatial Flight Manoeuvre. In the first chapter the standard ideas of the three types of aricraft motion considered in the absence of the aeroelastic phenomena are presented: the rotational motion around the mass centre; the mass centre motion; the flight task and the optimizing strategy. Some classical methods of flight control system synthesis are presented; they are performed on linearized models. Afterwards it is stated that some aircrafts - the experimental models - crashed due to neglectance of nonlinear effects. Starting from these facts the authors concentrate on obtaining some complete (universal) model of the aircraft dynamics with particular reference to the nominal motion. Finally, the model is obtained having as state variables the deviations from some nominal motion. With this modelling background the authors consider the stabilization and control problem. The so-called dynamic flight control is proposed, based on decentralized control. For the usual aircraft subsystems the controllers (compensators) are synthesized by linear-quadratic techniques and afterwards the parameters are readjusted in order to meet overall system stability requirements. Mutual system coupling is no longer neglected. The nonlinear effects are taken into account via first approximation stability. This design procedure is based on a decentralized control programme package which was previously used in robot decentralized control. As it was already mentioned this is not a theoretical book but of engineering applications. Nevertheless, it contains a variety of models and design procedures which represent tough (and interesting) problems for mathematicians eager to put a background of rigor on these topics.