Nonlinear Robust Control and Observation for Aeroelastic Launch Vehicles with Propellant Slosh in a Turbulent Atmosphere

Nonlinear Robust Control and Observation for Aeroelastic Launch Vehicles with Propellant Slosh in a Turbulent Atmosphere

Mooij, E. (TU Delft Astrodynamics & Space Missions)
Wang, Xuerui (TU Delft Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics)

2023

This paper focuses on the attitude control and propellant slosh suppression of aeroelastic launch vehicles in a turbulent atmosphere. For a five-degree pitch-angle block command, the tracking performance of the selected Incremental Non-Linear Dynamic Inversion Sliding Mode Controller (INDI-SMC) shows excellent tracking performance. However, turbulence still inevitably leads to oscillatory behaviour in the swivel command. Various filter designs have been implemented to improve the smoothness of INDI-SMC. Using either a notch or band-pass filter in the sensor-feedback loops of pitch angle and pitch rate only marginally reduced the swivel oscillations, but did not solve the problem for the rigid-body control. For the flexible launcher with slosh dynamics, filtering of the sensor-feedback signals reduced the oscillations in swivel command, and elastic and slosh motion significantly, but could not completely remove them. The preliminary design of a rigid-body state observer has been included, and the results show that the INDI-SMC controller remains stable in the presence of engine dynamics, sloshing, flexible modes, input errors due to the use of rigid-body and slosh-state observers, while flying in a turbulent wind field.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5c22034c-22bc-40d9-904f-07ae4f8b20c0

https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-1999

978-1-62410-699-6

AIAA SciTech Forum 2023

AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum, 2023-01-23 → 2023-01-27, National Harbor, MD & Online, Washington, United States

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2023 E. Mooij, Xuerui Wang