Model and Sensor Based Nonlinear Adaptive Flight Control with Online System Identification

Consensus exists that many loss-of-control (LOC) in flight accidents caused by severe aircraft damage or system failure could be prevented if flight performance could be recovered using the valid and remaining control authorities. However, the safe maneuverability of a post-failure aircraft will inevitably be reduced due to the malfunction. Non...

Adaptive Backstepping Control and Safety Analysis for Modern Fighter Aircraft

There exist many examples of aircraft incidents in which the pilots have successfully used the remaining control authority over an aircraft to save the airframe and its passengers and cargo from apparently hopeless failure conditions. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Several accidents happened in which the crew was not able to save the...

Adaptive Backstepping Flight Control for Modern Fighter Aircraft

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the potential of the nonlinear adaptive backstepping control technique in combination with online model identification for the design of a reconfigurable flight control system for a modern fighter aircraft. Adaptive backstepping is a recursive, Lyapunov-based, nonlinear design method, that makes use...

Fault Tolerant Flight Control: A Physical Model Approach

Safety is of paramount importance in all transportation systems, but especially in civil aviation. Therefore, in civil aviation, a lot of developments focus on the improvement of safety levels and reducing the risks that critical failures occur. When one analyses recent aircraft accident statistics, it is clear that a significant portion is...

Aeroelastic model identification of winglet loads from flight test data

Numerical computational methods are getting more and more sophisticated every day, enabling more accurate aircraft load predictions. In the structural design of aircraft higher levels of flexibility can be tolerated to arrive at a substantial weight reduction. The result is that aircraft of the future can be bigger, have better performance and...

An Integrated Approach to Aircraft Modelling and Flight Control Law Design

The design of flight control laws (FCLs) for automatic and manual (augmented) control of aircraft is a complicated task. FCLs have to fulfil large amounts of performance criteria and must work reliably in all flight conditions, for all aircraft configurations, and in adverse weather conditions. Consequently, a large part of the FCL design...