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Huajun Gong1, Ziyang Zhen1,*, Xin Li1, Ju Jiang1 and Xinhua Wang1
1 College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
* Corresponding author E-mail: zhenziyang@nuaa.edu.cn
Received 9 Jun 2012; Accepted 2 Nov 2012
DOI: 10.5772/54816
© 2013 Gong et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract The level change mode is an essential part of pilot’s operating burden, increasing economic efficiency
large civil aircraft automatic flight control systems. In and so on, so it is an essential part of a large civil aircraft.
cruise, with the decrease of the plane’s weight caused by The automatic flight control system produces and
fuel consumption and the influence of bad weather, such transmits automatic control instructions to achieve
as thunderstorms, the level change mode is required to automatic or semi‐automatic flight path control, or to
solve this problem. This work establishes a nonlinear control the aircraft to restrain all kinds of disturbances
model of large aircraft, takes level changed from 9500m to automatically. Autopilot, the driving rod/reel
10100m as an example to design control laws for the level manipulation, automatic throttle and structural mode
change mode in cruise. The classical engineering method control all constitute the automatic flight control system.
is used to design longitudinal and lateral control laws
In modern aviation, civil aircraft from all over the world
synthetically. The flight qualities are considered in the
all have many kinds of control modes, and can achieve
design process. Simulation results indicate the control
many kinds of flight tasks. So in the phase of automatic
laws can meet design requirements and have a good anti‐
flight control system designing, for each mode, it needs a
gust performance.
flight control engineer to design control laws that meet
the requirements of performance index, which effects the
Keywords Large Aircraft, Level Change, Attitude Control,
quality of the designed control laws and directly impacts
Classical Control
flying qualities and flight safety. In an automatic flight
control system, the mode selection panel (MSP) produces
1. Introduction a control mode choosing the interface for the pilot.
Generally, all control modes can be divided into three
The fly‐by‐wire automatic flight control system has categories: vertical mode, horizontal mode and automatic
obvious advantages such as improving handling throttle mode. The level change (FLCH or LVL CHG)
characteristics, enhancing flight safety, reducing the mode studied in this paper belongs to the vertical mode.
2. Mathematic Model of Large Aircraft
2.1 Nonlinear model
Based on the aerodynamic parameters of the Boeing707, a
nonlinear model with total variables is established. The
structure of the nonlinear model of the large aircraft is
shown in Figure 2 and the variablesʹ definitions are
shown in Table 1.
Variables Notation Variables Notation
180 179 Xb Axial force Angle of attack
Figure 1. Flight level equipped standard diagram Yb Sideforce Sideslip angle
Zb Normal lift force Pitch attitude
There are not enough studies on both design longitude
and lateral control laws, or testing of the control V Airspeed Roll attitude
systems’ anti‐disturbance abilities. Reference [1] uses Elevator angle
Lb Rolling moment e
nonlinear energy‐based control method to achieve civil
aircraft automatic landing, where the control system is Mb Pitching moment T Throttle opening
able to cope with various flight conditions and the
Nb Yawing moment a Aileron angle
stability and performance robustness is guaranteed.
Reference [2] applies linear parameter‐varying (LPV) r Rudder angle
p Roll rate
control synthesis to design fault tolerant controllers for
Boeing 747‐100/200. Reference [3] uses the adaptive q Pitch rate r Yaw rate
sliding‐mode control method to design the flight path Table 1. Variables’ notation
tracking control law of civil aircraft. This method can
improve flight performance and at the same time
Level change mode control laws for large civil aircraft in u ( s) 1 20
cruise phase are studied in this work. The simulation is in GS T
(4)
u( s) 0.05s 1 s 20
condition of flight level changing from 9500m to 10100m,
during the climbing phase. When height changes, so too The transfer functions of elevator servo system, aileron
do air density and air temperature, therefore model servo system and rudder servo system are shown as (5).
parameters will change. However, the height only has Both of them are inertial first‐order systems whose time
small change, thus the model parameters change not too constants are 0.1s.
large. So parameters of the middle section can be used to
establish the mathematic model of the whole process. The 10
G G G (5)
selected trim point is that the cruise height equals e a r s 10
10000m, air speed equals 240m/s, pitch angle and angle of
attack both equal 0.26°, and at this time, longitudinal The main task of this paper is designing a control law of
linear formula is shown as level change mode for the Boeing 707 in the cruise phase.
At first, the simplified transfer function should be
x Alon x Blonu (1) obtained by the linear formulas. The simplified transfer
functions of longitudinal short‐period motion are shown
T
here, state vector x V q , input vector in (6) and (7). The simplified transfer function of
T
u e T , unit of V is m/s, units of , longitudinal long‐period motion is shown in (8) .
and e are all rad, unit of q is rad/s, T is opening
degree of throttle, its unit is percentage form and the
( s) ‐1.8921s‐1.0976
coefficient matrices are as follows. G (6)
e
e ( s) s s2 0.8952s 2.6646
‐0.0050 6.5164 0 ‐9.800
‐0.0251 ‐0.0001
Blon V ( s ) 6.4159s+3.9323
‐1.8921 ‐0.1418 GV (8)
T T ( s) s2 0.6180s 0.0057
0 0
www.intechopen.com Huajun Gong, Ziyang Zhen, Xin Li, Ju Jiang and Xinhua Wang: 3
Automatic Flight Control System Design of Level Change Mode for a Large Aircraft
Air speed Air speed
240.1 800
240.08
600
240.06
V (m/s)
V (m /s)
400
240.04
240.02 200
240 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
t (s) t (s)
Angle of attack
0.262 Angle of attack
5
0.26 0
(deg)
(deg)
0.258 -5
0.256 -10
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
t (s) t (s)
Altitude x 10
4
Altitude
10000.5 2
10000 1
9999.5
H (m)
H (m)
0
9999
-1
9998.5
-2
9998 0 100 200 300 400 500
0 100 200 300 400 500 t (s)
t (s) Figure 4. Flight state responses with elevator input
Figure 3. Flight state responses under trim conditions
When the elevator angle increment is 1deg, the flight
2.3 Natural properties analysis states responses are shown in Figure 4. Although the
aircraft system in trim state is stable, we get that the
Give the trim values of the large aircraft, the elevator
system without suitable control system is being to diffuse
angle is ‐1.06deg, throttle opening is 9.27%, airspeed is
even if the elevator angle is slightly large.
240m/s, height is 10000m and attack angle is 0.26deg. The
responses of airspeed, attack angle and height are shown
When the throttle opening increment value is 0.01, the
in Figure 3. As can be seen from the results, the flight
flight state responses are shown in Figure 5. We can see
states almost keep the trim values, and have a little
that when the airspeed slightly increases, the attack angle
oscillating with long periods, caused by the small
slightly decreases and the height increases when the
deviations of the given elevator angle and the throttle
throttle opening increases. If the throttle opening
opening values.
increases too much, this can also make the flight states
diffuse.
Vco
0.2 C nz q (9)
g
0.18
Normal overload and angle of attack have a relationship
0.16 expressed by
0 100 200 300 400 500
t (s) V0
nz Z 15.0122 (10)
g
4
x 10 Altitude
1.06
Then the C signal can be expressed by
1.04
C 15.0122 12.4q (11)
H (m)
1.02
The transfer function from the elevator deflection angle to
the C signal is shown as
1
‐23.8373s‐42.1215
GC s
(12)
0.98
0 100 200 300 400 500
e
s s2 0.8952s 2.6646
t (s)
Figure 5. Flight state responses with throttle input At first, the C controller must be designed and make C
index in the packet line [7], then use the root locus
3. Designing of Control Laws method to design the pitch angle control law ‐ the whole
pitch attitude control law of the elevator channel is
3.1 Control system structure
shown as
From the engineering perspective, in this work the
10
classical control method is used to design the control e [ 0.42C 6.9( c ) 3.3 ( c )dt ] (13)
s 10
laws. The control laws are designed step by step from the
inner loop to the outer loop. A control structure diagram The transfer function of the closed pitch attitude control
of the level change mode is established as shown in loop is shown as
Figure 6. In Figure 6, the lateral control loop aims to
achieve keeping the flight heading, and the throttle
G theta _ cl G s
channel has a feedback of air speed to achieve keeping
c
(14)
3 2
the air speed constant. 21.48 s 34.95 s 18.86 s 3.374
6 5 4 3 2
0.1892 s 2.171s 14.67 s 54.26 s 49.43 s 18.86 s 3.374
www.intechopen.com Huajun Gong, Ziyang Zhen, Xin Li, Ju Jiang and Xinhua Wang: 5
Automatic Flight Control System Design of Level Change Mode for a Large Aircraft
uw vw ww
T 0
V
Vc T
q
e0 nz
e
h
h
a
r p
r
Figure 6. Control structure flowchart of the level change mode
0 0 H 0 0
q 1 V0 H 1 H
Gp e G
s 57.3 s
e V0 nz C
H c Gele Ge Z
g
C
Figure 7. Control structure flowchart of the elevator channel
In the case of keeping airspeed constant, that is with Ghd _ open2
automatic throttle control, flight path bank angle
increment and pitch angle increment have a 16702.63 (s+0.5817) (s+0.5787) (s+0.4667) (18)
2 2
( s 5.404)( s 0.613)( s 0.58)( s 0.5208s 0.1466)( s 4.969s 38.81)
relationship as shown in (15). Flight path bank angle
increment and vertical velocity have a relationship as
shown in (16). In (18), there are cancellations of zeros and poles, after
eliminating two dipoles: P1=‐0.58, Z1=‐0.5787 and P2=‐
Z 0.613, Z2=‐0.5817, a simplified transfer function is
, Z ‐0.6130 (15)
s Z obtained shown as
H V 16702.63 (s+0.4667)
0 (16) G hd _ open2
2 2 (19)
57.3 ( s 5.404)( s 0.5208 s 0.1466 )( s 4.969 s 38.81)
From (15) and (16), the transfer function from c to H Based on (19), the vertical velocity controller can be
is expressed by designed to achieve tracking control of the vertical
velocity command. Through the root locus method,
Ghd _ open G
H
s parameters of the vertical velocity controller are
designed as P=0.02, I=0.01. The altitude control is the
c
3 2
3160 s 5142s 2775s 496.4
(17)
outer loop of the vertical velocity control, when the
7 6 5 4 3 2
0.1892 s 2.287 s 16 s 63.25s 82.69 s 49.16 s 14.94s 2.068 parameter of the altitude controller is P=0.4, the root
locus of the whole altitude control loop is shown as in
Equation (17) is a seven‐order transfer function which is
Figure 8 ‐ the poles of the closed loop are shown in
not convenient for root locus design, so it can be
Table 2.
converted to zero‐pole form as
0
In Figure 9, altitude keeps constant at 9500m during the
first 20 seconds, changes to 10100m from 20s to 80s, and
-5 finally keeps constant at 10100m. During the whole
process, overshoot of altitude response is zero, gust
disturbance has little effect on the level change mode, and
-10
-8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 the control system shows good anti‐wind disturbance
R lA i
Figure 8. Root locus of the altitude control loop performance. In the climbing process, airspeed keeps
constant, pitch angle increases to 3.2 , and its overshoot
Pole Value Damping Frequency is less than 20%. Both in the connecting process and the
0.297 0.0927i 0.955 0.311 cutting process of the level change mode, the angle of
1.26 1.29i 0.7 1.8
attack shows about two degrees of fluctuation, but in the
steady state process, the angle of attack keeps constant.
2.59 4.69i 0.484 5.36
Lateral control achieves the action of heading holding,
Table 2. Poles of the altitude control closed loop when the gust disappears, and the heading is the same as
that before the gust appears. Roll angle changes within
Finally, the designed control laws must be put into a 10 , sideslip angle changes within 1 , and after the gust
nonlinear model to test the control effects. If the results
disappears, roll angle and sideslip angle soon restore to
are not good enough, the control parameters must be
the initial trim state.
tuned again in a small range, until the best effects are
achieved. This work fine‐tunes the pitch attitude control
It is worth pointing out that when the flight level
law and all the control laws of the level change mode are
becomes much larger, because of the aerodynamic
shown as (20).
parameters, air density and temperature change, the
control effect is obviously worse. Therefore, the control
10
e s 10 ( 5.2q 0.42Nz 8 c 2 c dt) law needs to be designed again to adjust to the new flight
environment, and smoothly switch to a control law for
20 1
T (0.1( Vc V ) 0.01 Vc V dt ) the new flight environment.
s 20 s 1
(20)
a 10 0.85p 4 1 c 0.8 1 c dt
s 10 s1 s1
10 s 10200
r 2 r 6 c 3 c dt
s 10 s 1 10000
H (m)
Among this 9800
9600
c 0.02 h h c 0.01 h h c dt 100
3
50 2
Vc c 0 1 x 10
4
Yg (m) 0 0
Xg (m)
h c 0.4 h hc
10200
4. Simulation and Analysis
10000
Here we apply the designed control laws to the nonlinear
model of the large aircraft to simulate and test. In
H (m)
9800 4
simulation, from 35s to 45s, we input a gust disturbance, x 10
1.01
and decompose the speed of the gust into the X axis, Y axis 9600 1.008
and Z axis in the body coordinate. The speed component in 1.006
70 75 80
each axis is respectively 5m/s, 3m/s and 2m/s. From 20s to 9400
70s, with regard to altitude slope command the rate of 0 20 40 60 80 100
t (s)
climbing is 12m/s, this makes the flight level change from
www.intechopen.com Huajun Gong, Ziyang Zhen, Xin Li, Ju Jiang and Xinhua Wang: 7
Automatic Flight Control System Design of Level Change Mode for a Large Aircraft
250 5. Conclusion
240 large aircraft is further obtained, and then the root locus
method is used to design the control laws of Level
235 Change mode of large aircraft. Based on the simplified
transfer function, the longitudinal and lateral control laws
230 are designed, to achieve airspeed holding, heading
0 50 100
holding and level change. The nonlinear model based
t (s) simulation results show that the designed control laws
6 can meet the requirements of performance index of large
aircraft, and the whole control system has a better anti‐
4 gust performance.
(deg)
2 6. Acknowledgments
1
7. References
(deg)
0 Sliding Mode Control. 2011 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles
Symposium (IV), Baden‐Baden, Germany.
-5 [4] Kato Akio, Inagaki Yoshiki (2008) Control Law for
Automatic Landing Using Fuzzy‐Logic Control.
-10 Transactions of the Japan Society for Aeronautical
0 50 100 and Space Sciences, vol. 50, no. 170, pp. 274‐283.
t (s) [5] Jian Li, Weiguo Zhang, Guangwen Li (2005) Survey on
the Application of Synthesis Method in Robust
1
Flight Control System Design. Journal of Projectiles,
0.5
Rockets, Missiles and Guidance. vol. 25, no. 4.
[6] Leyao Li, Yan Li, Xinmin Wang. (2010) Design of
(deg)