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ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA ›› 2017, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (5): 120541-120541.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2016.0242

• Fluid Mechanics and Flight Mechanics • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Rotor-state feedback control for helicopter in atmospheric turbulence

JI Honglei, CHEN Renliang, LI Pan   

  1. National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Rotorcraft Aeromechanics, College of Aerospace Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
  • Received:2016-06-17 Revised:2016-08-24 Online:2017-05-15 Published:2016-09-12
  • Supported by:

    National Natural Science Foundation of China (51405227,11672128)

Abstract:

This paper develops a helicopter flight control system integrated with a Rotor-State Feedback (RSF) control law to improve helicopter flying qualities at low speed in turbulent atmospheric environment. Based on the baseline explicit model-following control system, the feedback gains of the body and rotor states are designed in synergy for comprehensive optimization of both the stability of the coupling rotor/fuselage dynamics and the turbulence alleviation in the interested frequency range of flying qualities (1-12 rad/s). Meanwhile, a feed-forward compensation design is added to improve the helicopter responsiveness to pilot controls. A linear analysis of the helicopter flying qualities shows that with the integration of the RSF control law, the stability of the coupling rotor/fuselage dynamics can be ensured, and the command tracking delay times of roll and pitch axes are reduced by 21.87% and 25.82% respectively, as well as the disturbance rejection bandwidths are improved by 243.22% and 72.56%. A high-order nonlinear flight dynamic model validated against flight test data is used to conduct a simulation to verify the integrated control system. Results show that with the integration of the RSF control law, the standard deviation of the helicopter roll and pitch rate responses to atmospheric turbulence are reduced by 55.68% and 26.81%, respectively. The flight control system integrated with the RSF control law has the capability to improve helicopter flying qualities in atmospheric turbulence.

Key words: helicopter, atmospheric turbulence, flying qualities, rotor-state feedback, model-following control, flight dynamics

CLC Number: