Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2018
Publication Title
International Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume
2018
Abstract
This paper investigates the utilization of differential thrust to help a commercial aircraft with a damaged vertical stabilizer in order to regain its lateral/directional stability. In the event of an aircraft losing its vertical stabilizer, the consequential loss of the lateral/directional stability and control is likely to cause a fatal crash. In this paper, an aircraft with a completely damaged vertical stabilizer is investigated, and a unique differential thrust-based adaptive control approach is proposed to achieve a stable flight envelope. The propulsion dynamics of the aircraft is modeled as a system of differential equations with engine time constant and time delay terms to study the engine response time with respect to a differential thrust input. The proposed differential thrust control module is then presented to map the rudder input to differential thrust input. Model reference adaptive control based on the Lyapunov stability approach is implemented to test the ability of the damaged aircraft to track the model aircraft’s (reference) response in an extreme scenario. Investigation results demonstrate successful application of such differential thrust approach to regain lateral/directional stability of a damaged aircraft with no vertical stabilizer. Finally, the conducted robustness and uncertainty analysis results conclude that the stability and performance of the damaged aircraft remain within desirable limits and demonstrate a safe flight mission through the proposed adaptive control methodology.
Recommended Citation
Long K. Lu and Kamran Turkoglu. "Adaptive Differential Thrust Methodology for Lateral/Directional Stability of an Aircraft with a Completely Damaged Vertical Stabilizer" International Journal of Aerospace Engineering (2018). https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/8654031
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
This article was originally published in the International Journal of Aerospace Engineering, volume 2018 (2018). It can also be found online at this link. Copyright © 2018 Long K. Lu and Kamran Turkoglu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.