Reconfigurable Flight Control Design for the Complex Damaged Blended Wing Body Aircraft

Reconfigurable flight control using various kinds of adaptive control methods has been studied since the 1970s to enhance the survivability of aircraft in case of severe in-flight failure. Early studies were mainly focused on the failure of actuators. Recently, studies of reconfigurable flight controls that can accommodate complex damage (partial wing and tail loss) in conventional aircraft were reported. However, the partial wing loss effects on the aerodynamics of conventional type aircraft are quite different to those of BWB(blended wing body) aircraft. In this paper, a reconfigurable flight control algorithm was designed using a direct model reference adaptive method to overcome the instability caused by a complex damage of a BWB aircraft. A model reference adaptive control was incorporated into the inner loop rate control system enhancing the performance of the baseline control to cope with abrupt loss of stability. Gains of the model reference adaptive control were polled out using the Liapunov's stability theorem. Outer loop attitude autopilot was designed to manage roll and pitch of the BWB UAV as well. A 6-DOF dynamic model was built-up, where the normal flight can be made to switch to the damaged state abruptly reflecting the possible real flight situation. 22% of right wing loss as well as 25% loss for both vertical tail and rudder control surface were considered in this study. Static aerodynamic coefficients were obtained via wind tunnel test. Numerical simulations were conducted to demonstrate the performance of the reconfigurable flight control system.