Accurately tracking hypersonic gliding vehicles via an LEO mega-constellation in relay tracking mode

In order to effectively defend against the threats of the hypersonic gliding vehicles(HGVs),HGVs should be tracked as early as possible,which is beyond the capability of the ground-based radars.Being benefited by the developing megaconstellations in low-Earth orbit,this paper proposes a relay tracking mode to track HGVs to overcome the above problem.The whole tracking mission is composed of several tracking intervals with the same duration.Within each tracking interval,several appropriate satellites are dispatched to track the HGV.Satellites that are planned to take part in the tracking mission are selected by a new derived observability criterion.The tracking performances of the proposed tracking mode and the other two traditional tracking modes,including the stare and track-rate modes,are compared by simulation.The results show that the relay tracking mode can track the whole trajectory of a HGV,while the stare mode can only provide a very short tracking arc.Moreover,the relay tracking mode achieve higher tracking accuracy with fewer attitude controls than the track-rate mode.

Scale effect removal and range migration correction for hypersonic target coherent detection

The detection of hypersonic targets usually confronts range migration(RM)issue before coherent integration(CI).The traditional methods aiming at correcting RM to obtain CI mainly considers the narrow-band radar condition.However,with the increasing requirement of far-range detection,the time bandwidth product,which is corresponding to radar’s mean power,should be promoted in actual application.Thus,the echo signal generates the scale effect(SE)at large time bandwidth product situation,influencing the intra and inter pulse integration performance.To eliminate SE and correct RM,this paper proposes an effective algorithm,i.e.,scaled location rotation transform(ScLRT).The ScLRT can remove SE to obtain the matching pulse compression(PC)as well as correct RM to complete CI via the location rotation transform,being implemented by seeking the actual rotation angle.Compared to the traditional coherent detection algorithms,Sc LRT can address the SE problem to achieve better detection/estimation capabilities.At last,this paper gives several simulations to assess the viability of ScLRT.

Fault-tolerant FADS system development for a hypersonic vehicle via neural network algorithms

Hypersonic vehicles suffer from extreme aerodynamic heating during flights, especially around the area of leading edge due to its small curvature. Therefore, flush air data sensing(FADS) system has been developed to perform accurate measurement of the air data parameters. In the present study, the method to develop the FADS algorithms with fail-operational capability for a sharp-nosed hypersonic vehicle is provided. To be specific, the FADS system implemented with 16 airframe-integrated pressure ports is used as a case study. Numerical simulations of different freestream conditions have been conducted to generate the database for the FADS targeting in 2 ≤ Ma ≤ 5 and 0 km ≤ H ≤ 30 km. Four groups of neural network algorithms have been developed based on four different pressure port configurations, and the accuracy has been validated by 280 groups of simulations. Particularly, the algorithms based on the 16-port configuration show an excellent ability to serve as the main solver of the FADS, where 99. 5% of the angle-of-attack estimations are within the error band ±0. 2°. The accuracy of the algorithms is discussed in terms of port configuration. Furthermore, diagnosis of the system health is present in the paper. A fault-tolerant FADS system architecture has been designed, which is capable of continuously sensing the air data in the case that multi-port failure occurs, with a reduction in the system accuracy.

Minimum eigenvalue based adaptive fault compensation for hypersonic vehicles

The attitude tracking control problem is addressed for hypersonic vehicles under actuator faults that may cause an uncertain time-varying control gain matrix.An adaptive compensation scheme is developed to ensure system stability and asymptotic tracking properties,including a kinematic control signal and a dynamic control signal.To deal with the uncertainties of the control gain matrix,a new positive definite one is constructed.The minimum eigenvalue of such a new control gain matrix is estimated.Simulation results of application to an X-33 vehicle model verify the effectiveness of the proposed minimum eigenvalue based adaptive fault compensation scheme.

Effect of local wall temperature on hypersonic boundary layer stability and transition

Wall temperature significantly affects stability and receptivity of the boundary layer. Changing the wall temperature locally may therefore be an effective laminar flow control technique. However, the situation is complicated when the wall temperature distribution is nonuniform, and researchers have experimentally found that local wall cooling may delay the onset of transition. We attempt to clarify the physical mechanisms whereby the local wall temperature affects the transition and the stability of a hypersonic boundary layer. A numerical investigation of the disturbance evolution in a Mach-6 sharp cone boundary layer with local wall heating or cooling is conducted. Direct numerical simulation(DNS) is performed for the single-frequency and broadband disturbance evolution caused by random forcing. We vary the local wall temperature and the location of heating/cooling, and then use the eNmethod to estimate the transition onset. Our results show that local wall cooling amplifies high-frequency unstable waves while stabilizing low-frequency unstable waves, with local heating amplifying all unstable waves locally. The disturbance amplitude and second-mode peak frequency obtained by DNS agree well with the previous experimental results. Local cooling/heating has a dual effect on the stability of the hypersonic boundary layer. For local cooling, while it effectively inhibits the growth of the low-frequency unstable waves that dominate the transition downstream, it also further destabilizes the downstream flow. In addition, while upstream cooling can delay the transition, excessive cooling may promote it;local heating always slightly promotes the transition.Finally, recommendations are given for practical engineering applications based on the present results.

Progress in reentry trajectory planning for hypersonic vehicle

The reentry trajectory planning for hypersonic vehicles is critical and challenging in the presence of numerous nonlinear equations of motion and path constraints, as well as guaranteed satisfaction of accuracy in meeting all the specified boundary conditions. In the last ten years, many researchers have investigated various strategies to generate a feasible or optimal constrained reentry trajectory for hypersonic vehicles. This paper briefly reviews the new research efforts to promote the capability of reentry trajectory planning. The progress of the onboard reentry trajectory planning, reentry trajectory optimization, and landing footprint is summarized. The main challenges of reentry trajectory planning for hypersonic vehicles are analyzed, focusing on the rapid reentry trajectory optimization, complex geographic constraints, and coop- erative strategies.

Adaptive Sliding Mode Control for Re-entry Attitude of Near Space Hypersonic Vehicle Based on Backstepping Design

Combining sliding mode control method with radial basis function neural network(RBFNN), this paper proposes a robust adaptive control scheme based on backstepping design for re-entry attitude tracking control of near space hypersonic vehicle(NSHV) in the presence of parameter variations and external disturbances. In the attitude angle loop, a robust adaptive virtual control law is designed by using the adaptive method to estimate the unknown upper bound of the compound uncertainties. In the angular velocity loop, an adaptive sliding mode control law is designed to suppress the effect of parameter variations and external disturbances. The main benefit of the sliding mode control is robustness to parameter variations and external disturbances. To further improve the control performance, RBFNNs are introduced to approximate the compound uncertainties in the attitude angle loop and angular velocity loop, respectively. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, the tracking errors are shown to be asymptotically stable. Simulation results show that the proposed control system attains a satisfied control performance and is robust against parameter variations and external disturbances.

Experimental demonstration of a new concept of drag reduction and thermal protection for hypersonic vehicles

A new idea of drag reduction and thermal protection for hypersonic vehicles is proposed based on the combination of a physical spike and lateral jets for shockreconstruction. The spike recasts the bow shock in front of a blunt body into a conical shock, and the lateral jets work to protect the spike tip from overheating and to push the conical shock away from the blunt body when a pitching angle exists during flight. Experiments are conducted in a hypersonic wind tunnel at a nominal Mach number of 6. It is demonstrated that the shock/shock interaction on the blunt body is avoided due to injection and the peak pressure at the reattachment point is reduced by 70% under a 4° attack angle.

Aerodynamic map for soft and hard hypersonic level flight in near space

In this note, we design a velocity-altitude map for hypersonic level flight in near space of altitude 20-100 km. This map displays aerodynamic-related parameters associated with near space level flight, schematically or quantitatively. Various physical conditions for the near-space level flight are then characterized, including laminar or turbulent flow, rarefaction or continuous flow, aerodynamic heating, as well as conditions for sustaining level flight with and without orbital effect. This map allows one to identify conditions to have soft flight or hard flight, and this identification would be helpful for making correct planning on detailed studies of aerodynamics or making initial design of near space vehicles.

Flight control for a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle based on quasi-continuous high-order sliding mode

The focus of this paper is on control design and simulation for the longitudinal model of a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle（FAHV）.The model of interest includes flexibility effects and intricate couplings between the engine dynamics and flight dynamics.To overcome the analytical intractability of this model,a nominal control-oriented model is constructed for the purpose of feedback control design in the first place.Secondly,the multi-input multi-output（MIMO） quasi-continuous high-order sliding mode（HOSM） controller is proposed to track step changes in velocity and altitude,which is based on full state feedback.The simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

Coupled dynamic model of state estimation for hypersonic glide vehicle

Aiming at handling complicated maneuvers or other unpredicted emergencies for hypersonic glide vehicle tracking,three coupled dynamic models of state estimation based on the priori information between guidance variables and aerodynamics are presented. Firstly, the aerodynamic acceleration acting on the target is analyzed to reveal the essence of the target’s motion.Then three coupled structures for modeling aerodynamic parameters are developed by different ideas: the spiral model with a harmonic oscillator, the bank model with trigonometric functions of the bank angle and the guide model with the changing rule of guidance variables. Meanwhile, the comparison discussion is concluded to show the novelty and advantage of these models.Finally, a performance assessment in different simulation cases is presented and detailed analysis is revealed. The results show that the proposed models perform excellent properties. Moreover, the guide model produces the best tracking performance and the bank model shows the second; however, the spiral model does not outperform the maneuvering reentry vehicle(MaRV) model markedly.

Continuous Sliding Mode Controller with Disturbance Observer for Hypersonic Vehicles

In this paper, a continuous sliding mode controller with disturbance observer is proposed for the tracking control of hypersonic vehicles to suppress the chattering. The finite time disturbance observer is involved to make that the continuous sliding mode controller has the property of disturbance rejection.Due to continuous terms replacing the discontinuous term of traditional sliding mode control, switching modes of velocity and altitude firstly arrive at small regions with respect to disturbance observation errors. Switching modes keep zero and velocity and altitude asymptotically converge to their reference commands after disturbance observation errors disappear. Simulation results have proved the proposed method can guarantee the tracking of velocity and altitude with continuous sliding mode control laws,and also has the fast convergence rate and robustness.

Adaptive fault-tolerant controller design for airbreathing hypersonic vehicle with input saturation

The problem of fault-tolerant control is discussed for the longitudinal model of an airbreathing hypersonic vehicle （AHV） with actuator faults and external disturbances. Firstly, a fault-tolerant control strategy is presented for the longitudinal model of an AHV, which guarantees that velocity and altitude track their reference trajectories at an exponential convergence rate. However, this method needs to know the minimum value of the actuator efficiency factor and the upper bound of the external disturbances, which makes it not easy to implement. Then an improved adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed, where two adaptive laws are employed to estimate the upper bound of the external disturbances and the minimum value of the actuator efficiency factor, respectively. Secondly, the problem of designing a control scheme with control constraints is further considered, and a new adaptive fault-tolerant control strategy with input saturation is designed to guarantee that velocity and altitude track their reference trajectories. Finally, simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Polytopic LPV modeling and gain-scheduled switching control for a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle

A novel gain-scheduled switching control method for the longitudinal motion of a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle （FAHV） is proposed. Firstly, velocity and altitude are selected as scheduling variables, a polytopic linear parameter varying （LPV） model is developed to represent the complex nonlinear longitudinal dynamics of the FAHV. Secondly, based on the obtained polytopic LPV model, the flight envelope is divided into four smaller subregions, and four gain-scheduled controllers are designed for these parameter subregions. Then, by the defined switching characteristic function, these gain-scheduled controllers are switched in order to guarantee the closed-loop FAHV system to be asymptotically stable and satisfy a given tracking error performance criterion. The condition of gain-scheduled switching controller synthesis is given in terms of linear matrix inequalities （LMIs） which can be easily solved by using standard software packages. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the presented method.

A Rapid Analysis Tool for Aerodynamics/Aerothermodynamics of Hypersonic Vehicles

A rapid engineering surface panel method to analyze aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics of hypersonic vehicles is developed.To obtain the surface pressure distribution of a hypersonic vehicle,the local surface inclination method is applied to calculate the pressure coefficient for each surface panel element,of which the normal vector is corrected first by using an efficient data structure and Rey-casting algorithm,local Reynolds numbers are calculated according to the geometric streamline method,then the aerodynamic heating flux is computed by both reference enthalpy relations and Reynolds analogy method.Several typical test cases are performed and the results indicate that,the developed tool is effective in predicting the aerodynamics/aerothermodynamics for complex geometry of hypersonic vehicle in a wide range of Mach numbers with a sufficient accuracy.

Adding-Point Strategy for Reduced-Order Hypersonic Aerothermodynamics Modeling Based on Fuzzy Clustering

Reduced order models（ROMs） based on the snapshots on the CFD high-fidelity simulations have been paid great attention recently due to their capability of capturing the features of the complex geometries and flow configurations. To improve the efficiency and precision of the ROMs, it is indispensable to add extra sampling points to the initial snapshots, since the number of sampling points to achieve an adequately accurate ROM is generally unknown in prior, but a large number of initial sampling points reduces the parsimony of the ROMs. A fuzzy-clustering-based adding-point strategy is proposed and the fuzzy clustering acts an indicator of the region in which the precision of ROMs is relatively low. The proposed method is applied to construct the ROMs for the benchmark mathematical examples and a numerical example of hypersonic aerothermodynamics prediction for a typical control surface. The proposed method can achieve a 34.5% improvement on the efficiency than the estimated mean squared error prediction algorithm and shows same-level prediction accuracy.

Adaptive dynamic surface control for air-breathing hypersonic vehicle

This paper describes an adaptive control approach for an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle. The control objective is to provide robust altitudes and velocity tracking in the presence of model uncertainties and varying disturbances. A fuzzy-neural disturbance observer is developed to estimate uncertainties and disturbances, and the adaptive controller is synthesized by the dynamic surface approach combing with the observer. The tracking error at the steady state can be guaranteed to converge to inside of a small residue set which the size of the set can be an arbitrary small value. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented approach.

Tracking control for air-breathing hypersonic cruise vehicle based on tangent linearization approach

This paper is focused on developing a tracking controller for a hypersonic cruise vehicle using tangent linearization approach.The design of flight control systems for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles is a highly challenging task due to the unique characteristics of the vehicle dynamics.Motivated by recent results on tangent linearization control,the tracking control problem for the hypersonic cruise vehicle is reduced to that of a feedback stabilizing controller design for a linear time-varying system which can be accomplished by a standard design method of frozen-time control.Through a proper model transformation,it can be proven that the tracking error of the designed closed-loop system decays exponentially.Simulation studies are conducted for trimmed cruise conditions of 110000 ft and Mach 15 where the responses of the vehicle to step changes in altitude and velocity are evaluated.The effectiveness of the controller is demonstrated by simulation results.

A hypersonic target coherent integration detection algorithm based on Doppler feedback

The traversal search of multi-dimensional parameter during the process of hypersonic target echo signal coherent integration,leads to the problem of large amounts of calculation and poor real-time performance.In view of these problems,a modified polynomial Radon-polynomial Fourier transform(MPRPFT)hypersonic target coherent integration detection algorithm based on Doppler feedback is proposed in this paper.Firstly,the Doppler estimation value of the target is obtained by using the target point information obtained by subsequent non-coherent integration detection.Then,the feedback adjustment of the coherent integration process is performed by using the acquired target Doppler estimation value.Finally,the coherent integration is completed after adjusting the search interval of compensation.The simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively reduce the computational complexity and improve the real-time performance on the basis of the effective coherent integration of hypersonic target echo signals.

Experimental study on supersonic film cooling on the surface of a blunt body in hypersonic flow

The experimental study focuses on the heat flux on a double cone blunt body in the presence of tangential-slot super- sonic injection into hypersonic flow. The tests are conducted in a contoured axisymmetric nozzle with Mach numbers of 7.3 and 8.1, and the total temperature is about 900 K. The injection Mach number is 3.2, and total temperature is 300 K. A constant voltage circuit is developed to supply the temperature detectors instead of the normally used constant current circuit. The schlieren photographs are presented additionally to visualize the flow and help analyze the pressure relationship between the cooling flow and the main flow. The dependence of the film-cooling effectiveness on flow parameters, i.e. the blow ratio, the convective Mach number, and the attack angle, is determined. A semi-empirical formula is tested by the present data, and is improved for a better correlation.