Certifiable Fly-By-Wire Robust Control Laws for Flexible Civil Transport Aircraft : Structured H-Infinity Synthesis

New generation of civil transport aircraft can present aeroelastic coupling between flight mechanics and structural dynamics. The lower-frequency flexible dynamics can be perceptible by a fly-by-wire controller. This requires control law design that take into account the flexible dynamics. Robust control techniques have been investigated over the past 20 years for this purpose. They result in highly complex black box dynamical controller with a large number of states. It requires strong efforts to simplify the controller. This causes major challenges for industrial application and certification. Consequently, Canadian civil transport aircraft industry remained unconvinced that robust controller synthesis technique can lead to efficient and certifiable control law. However, most of industry concerns seem to be alleviated by the recent progresses at theoretical and tool levels. This project investigates if the new method can truly result in a certifiable control law for flexible civil transport aircraft by applying it to the tuning of certifiable control law considering a real flexible aircraft model.

Faculty Supervisor:

Student:

Partner:

Bombardier Inc.

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Aerospace and defense

University:

École Polytechnique de Montréal

Program:

Accelerate