Development of the flight control actuation system model for a Rotary Wing Remotely Piloted Air System (RW-RPAS) and study of the effects on the vehicle performances

The present work concerns the dynamic simulation of a control system for a rotary wing RPAS in autonomous flight. The study has been conducted in the MATLAB and Simulink environment: the former is used to load the parameters of the reference helicopter and the dimensions of the rods and levers used in the system; the latter is used to execute the dynamic simulation itself. It is worth noticing the parametric nature of the SW which has been used allows the analysis to be extended to any helicopter sharing the same architecture. The references for this study are Newton’s second law of dynamics for translation and acceleration and the studies of Hohenemenser and Sissingh on the dynamics of the rotor. The starting point of this paper are previous dissertations on the dynamics of the rotorcraft with an ideal control system: these are studied, analyzed and commented; then an introduction to the relevant components of the rotor and to the architecture of the system installed to change the pitch angle of the aerodynamic surfaces is provided. This architecture has been defined on the basis of a kinematic analysis which can be found in Appendix B. Then, once the architecture is defined, the dynamics of the components of the actuation system are studied and the necessary equations are expressed. Subsequently the dynamics of the actuation system are studied in the Simulink environment and the results of the simulation are analyzed. If the performance of the actuation system proves to be suitable for the task, it is implemented into the helicopter model. In the end the results of the simulation of the helicopter flight are compared to the original model which has been taken as a starting point and the differences are then discussed and commented