Control Authority Issues in Aircraft Conceptual Design: Critical Conditions, Estimation Methodology, Spreadsheet Assessment, Trim and Bibliography

All aircraft must meet controllability requirements to be certified for commercial use or adopted by the military. Many military aircraft also have additional maneuverability requirements. An aircraft's ability to meet these requirements is often limited by the amount of control authority available. Thus, it is essential for designers to evaluate the control authority of candidate concepts early in the conceptual design phase. Normally the designer considers numerous possible configurations before the stability and control group starts their analysis. An early evaluation by the designer, before detailed control system design starts, makes the design process much more efficient. In this report a methodology for rapid control power evaluation of conceptual and early preliminary design configurations against requirements at the critical flight conditions is established. First, the critical flight conditions to be considered using this methodology are discussed. Next, to examine a variety of aircraft configurations and accelerate the process of estimating stability and control derivatives, a FORTRAN program using the vortex-lattice method to estimate subsonic, low angle-of-attack aerodynamics is described. Then, a simple spreadsheet is used to combine the aerodynamic and geometric data to assess whether the design concept possesses adequate control power to satisfy the requirements at the critical flight conditions. This allows the designer to perform " what if " studies to decide how to change the design to satisfy the requirements. To trim configurations with three lifting surfaces or two lifting surfaces and thrust vectoring, a program implementing a recent NASA Langley method is provided. For further study, a bibliography relevant to control power issues is included.

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