Life Extending Control of Helicopter Based on Dynamic Inversion

The purpose of using life extending control for Black Hawk UH-60 helicopter is to make a trade-off between the handling qualities and the service life of critical components. An increase in service life span results in enhanced safety and the reduction in maintenance costs. This paper presents a design methodology of life extending control for structural durability and high performance of mechanical system, which is based on an explicit dynamic inversion control scheme. A real-time nonlinear fatigue crack growth model is built to predict fatigue damage resulting from the impact of cyclic bending stress on rotor shaft, which serves as an indicator of service life. The 4-axis gainscheduled flight controller, whose gains are adjusted as a function of damage and flight velocity, is designed to regulate roll attitude, pitch attitude, vertical velocity and yaw rate. The nonlinear system simulation results show that the responses can meet the requirements on ADS-33 Level 1 handling qualities and that the 4-axis decoupling control is realized. As the damage increases, the tracking performance is slightly degraded, which results in smaller transients in bending moment response.

Research of an Active Tunable Vibration Absorber for Helicopter Vibration Control

Significant structural vibration is an undesirable characteristic in helicopter flight that leads to structural fatigue, poor ride quality for passengers and high acoustic signature. Previous Individual Blade Control (IBC) techniques to reduce these effects have been hindered by electromechanical limitations of piezoelectric actuators. The Smart Spring is an active tunable vibration absorber using IBC approach to adaptively alter the 'structural impedance' at the blade root. In this paper, a mathematical model was developed to predict the response under harmonic excitations. An adaptive notch algorithm was designed and implemented on a TMS320c40 DSP platform. Reference signal synthesis techniques were used to automatically track the shifts in the fundamental vibratory frequency due to variations in flight conditions. Closed-loop tests performed on the proof-of-concept hardware achieved significant vibration suppression at harmonic peaks as well as the broadband reduction in vibration. The investigation verified the capability of the Smart Spring to suppress multiple harmonic components in blade vibration through active impedance control.

ADAPTIVE FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEM OF ARMED HELICOPTER USING WAVELET NEURAL NETWORK METHOD

A discussion is devoted to the design of an adaptive flight control system of the armed helicopter using wavelet neural network method. Firstly, the control loop of the attitude angle is designed with a dynamic inversion scheme in a quick loop and a slow loop. respectively. Then, in order to compensate the error caused by dynamic inversion, the adaptive flight control system of the armed helicopter using wavelet neural network method is put forward, so the BP wavelet neural network and the Lyapunov stable wavelet neural network are used to design the helicopter flight control system. Finally, the typical maneuver flight is simulated to demonstrate its validity and effectiveness. Result proves that the wavelet neural network has an engineering practical value and the effect of WNN is good.

A New Hybrid Control Scheme for an Integrated Helicopter and Engine System

A new hybrid control scheme is presented with a robust multiple model fusion control（RMMFC） law for a UH-60 helicopter and an active disturbance rejection control（ADRC） controller for its engines.This scheme is a control design method with every subsystem designed separately but fully considering the couplings between them.With three subspaces with respect to forward flight velocity,a RMMFC is proposed to devise a four-loop reference signal tracing control for the helicopter,which escapes the closed-loop system from unstable state due to the extreme complexity of this integrated nonlinear system.The engines are controlled by the proposed ADRC decoupling controller,which fully takes advantage of a good compensation ability for unmodeled dynamics and extra disturbances,so as to compensate torque disturbance in power turbine speed loop.By simulating a forward acceleration flight task,the RMMFC for the helicopter is validated.It is apparent that the integrated helicopter and engine system（IHES） has much better dynamic performance under the new control scheme.Especially in the switching process,the large transient is significantly weakened,and smooth transition among candidate controllers is achieved.Over the entire simulation task,the droop of power turbine speed with the proposed ADRC controller is significantly slighter than with the conventional PID controller,and the response time of the former is much faster than the latter.By simulating a rapid climb and descent flight task,the results also show the feasibility for the application of the proposed multiple model fusion control.Although there is aggressive power demand in this maneuver,the droop of power turbine speed with an ADRC controller is smaller than using a PID controller.The control performance for helicopter and engine is enhanced by adopting this hybrid control scheme,and simulation results in other envelope state give proofs of robustness for this new scheme.

Study of helicopter autorotation landing following engine failure based on a six-degree-of-freedom rigid-body dynamic model

This paper focuses on the prediction of the safe autorotation landing operations of a helicopter following engine failure.The autorotation landing procedure is formulated as a nonlinear optimal control problem based on an augmented six-degree-of-freedom rigid-body flight dynamic model.First,the cost function and constraints are properly selected.The direct transcription approach is then employed to solve the optimal control problem.For a UH-60 helicopter,the optimal solutions with the rigid-body model are compared with those obtained using a two-dimensional point-mass model.It is found that the optimal solutions using the two different models show reasonably good agreement,and furthermore the optimal solutions using the rigid-body model involve the time histories of angular rates and attitudes,lateral velocity and position,as well as pitch controls.Finally the optimal control formulations with different cost functions are proposed for taking account of 1-s time delay and minimum touchdown speed.The calculated control strategies and trajectories are realistic.