Gust Alleviation System for a PrandtlPlane Aircraft using NDI control strategy

The constant growth in air traffic has led to the necessity of developing new solutions to face the problems of modern aviation. In this scenario the PARSIFAL project has led to promising results in the application of the PrandtlPlane configuration. This master’s thesis was conducted in close collaboration with the Aerospace Department of TUDelft, partner of the PARSIFAL consortium led by Pisa University. The work is based on a in-house, fully nonlinear dynamic model built in the MATLAB/Simulink environment, named PHALANX. The net result of this work is an overall improvement in the performances of the control system based on Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion architecture (NDI). A Pilot in the loop controller consisting in a Proportional-Integral compensator and a Feed-Forward controller has been studied, highlighting benefits and disadvantages in this system. Then a gust alleviation system based on a full-state feedback has been design through the formulation of linear quadratic cost function and limitation of the turbulence effects. Finally, a multiloop control system has been implemented to perform a step cruise mission. This system has been extended with a Direct Lift Control (DLC) strategy in order to improve the gust alleviation feature to damp the oscillations in the load factor incraesing the passangers confort and decreasign the loads on the structures