NONLINEAR SIMULATION OF A MODIFIED F-16 WITH FULL-ENVELOPE CONTROL LAWS

A manual flight-control system for a modern fighter aircraft incorpora ting thrust vectoring is presented. Design goals are posed in terms of maintaining acceptable flying qualities during high-angle-of-attack ( AOA) maneuvering, while also achieving robustness to model parameter v ariations and unmodeled dynamics over the entire flight envelope. The need for gain scheduling is eliminated by using an inner-loop dynamic inversion/outer-loop structured singular value (mu) - synthesis contro l structure which separately addresses operating envelope variations a nd robustness concerns, respectively. Realistic representations of bot h structured (real parametric) and unstructured uncertainty are includ ed in the design/analysis process. A flight-condition-dependent contro l selector maps generalized controls to physical control deflections. Simulation maneuvers showed excellent control at both low and high ang les of attack, without scheduling dynamic controllers. (C) 1998 Elsevi er Science Ltd. All rights reserved.