Abstract: With no elevator and conventional rudder, a combat flying wing is mounted with redundant innovative control surfaces, and uses drag rudders to realize directional control. The drag rudders can generate three-axis forces and moments, with features of single side deflect to fulfill directional control, and both side deflect to increase drag and decelerate the aircraft. In order to solve the new problems of the number of control surfaces exceeding the control commands and the lack of clear axial direction of the control surfaces, control allocation is introduced to the the flight control system of the combat flying wing. Through simulation and calculation, a comparative study is made of the implementation on the control allocation of a combat flying wing by the three methods of generalized inverse, direct allocation and optimization based on nonlinear programming. The results indicate that optimization based on nonlinear programming could comparatively better solve the problems of the nonlinearity of the control model, both-side-deflect and drag control of the drag rudders. It is concluded that this method is more suitable for implementation on a combat flying wing.

Key words: flying wing, multiple control surfaces, drag rudder, control allocation, optimization, nonlinear programming, flight control