Short-range air-to-surface missiles have become globally popular in the last two decades. As a performance driver, the type of guidance law gains importance. In this study, proportional navigation, velocity pursuit, and augmented proportional navigation guidance laws, whose resulting guidance commands take the form of lateral acceleration, are applied to a short-range air-to-surface missile against both stationary and maneuvering ground targets. Body pursuit and linear homing guidance laws, which yield angular commands, are additionally applied. Having completed the relevant computer simulations, we conclude that none of the acceleration-and angle-based guidance laws are absolutely superior to the others.
The main area of emphasis in this paper is to investigate the methods and technology for aerodynamic configuration sizing of missiles and to develop a software platform in MATLAB® environment as a design tool which has an ability of optimizing the external configuration of missiles for a set of flight requirements specified by the user through a graphical user interface. A genetic algorithm based optimization tool is prepared by MATLAB® that helps the designer to find out the best external geometry candidates in the conceptual design stage. Missile DATCOM is employed as the aerodynamic coefficient prediction package to determine aerodynamic coefficients of each external geometry candidate in finding their performance merits by integrating their dynamic equations of motion. Numerous external geometry candidates are rapidly eliminated according to objectives and constraints specified by designers, which provide necessary information in preliminary design. In this elimination, the external geometry candidates are graded according to their flight performances in order to discover an optimum solution. All of the flight performance data are obtained by running a two degree-of-freedom simulation in the vertical plane. In order to solve the resulting multi-objective optimization problem with a set of constraint of linear and nonlinear nature and in equality and inequality forms, geneticalgorithm-based methods are applied. Hybrid encoding methods in which the integer configuration variables (i.e., nose shape and control type) and real-valued geometrical dimension (i.e., diameter, length) parameters are encoded in the same individual chromosome. An external configuration design tool (EXCON) is developed as a synthesis and external sizing tool for the subsonic cruise missiles. A numerical example, the reconfiguration problem of an anti-ship cruise missile, is presented to demonstrate the accuracy and feasibility of the conceptual design tool.
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