Hypersonic flight control considering parametric variations and VGI effects

Abstract

Despite advantages of variable geometry inlet (VGI) in improving scramjet efficiency, a concern of its negative effects on aerodynamics persists. This paper presents a novel longitudinal control for the hypersonic vehicle model with further considerations on both strong VGI effects and unpredictable parametric variations, which is practical but hard to handle. Our design uses an auxiliary signal and a bound adaptation mechanism to synthetically accommodate VGI effects (including VGI servomechanism characteristics and VGI couplings with aerodynamics), time-varying parameters and structural flexibility while achieving good tracking performances via a relatively low-dimension adaptive algorithm.

Keywords:

• Hypersonic vehicle
• flight control
• variable geometry inlet
• parametric variation
• adaptive

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Hao An http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0919-2283

Qianqian Wu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4954-2495

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number HIT.NSRIF.2020021], in part by the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents [grant number BX201700064], in part by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant number 2018M631933], and in part by the Heilongjiang Postdoctoral Financial Assistance [grant number LBH-Z17079].