Preliminary design of advanced flight control system architectures for commercial transport aircraft

Abstract

The functional enhancement of Flight Control Systems (FCS) show potential benefits for commercial transport aircraft. Furthermore, the consideration of new technologies and more-electric concepts lead to a significant increase of the design space for FCS architectures. The objective of this contribution is to enable the preliminary design of advanced FCS architectures for a given FCS configuration. Based on a comprehensive literature research, the main subsystems are identified and simplified models of the architecture are developed. Additionally, technological constraints as well as design rules for actuator distribution, and power redundancy are defined. The design rules for advanced FCS architectures are derived from the basic design rules of existing FCS architectures of commercial transport aircraft. Finally, the presented method is implemented into a design tool. The resulting tool enables the preliminary design of multifunctional FCS architectures.

An Integrated Design Approach for Advanced Flight Control Systems with Multifunctional Flight Control Devices

“…Whereas technological constraints and top-level aircraft system architectures restrict the design space. The design method for the preliminary design of FCS architectures is based on a top-down approach [16], using defined technological assumptions, defined design rules and distribution logics for redundancy and reconfiguration, see Fig. 11.…”

“…This architectural design approach is also implemented in MATLAB ® . More details of the design method are shown in a previous work of Lampl et al [16].…”

“…Furthermore, the largest benefit is gained, if all systems on aircraft level are designed for the MEA [5]. In general, the aircraft power generation and distribution system architecture is defined either as 3H (3 hydraulic circuits) or as 2H-2E (2 hydraulic -2 electrical circuits) and has a major impact on the FCS architecture design [16]. In this case study, the baseline aircraft has a 2H-2E architecture as illustrated in Fig.…”

“…Based on these findings, a transition from a knowledge-based design to a functional-driven design of FCS is recommended. The intent of a functional-driven design approach is to increase the solution space and to enable multifunctional concepts [1,6].…”

“…2. The first stage of the design method is a functional-driven design approach to explore the potential design space, and to derive several concepts of advanced FCS [6]. In the second stage, the configuration and architecture of an advanced FCS concept is designed in an integrated and iterative design process.…”