Indigenous design of pitch control system of short range aircraft

Abstract

In aviation industry, our country all along comprises a group of airlines; operating and maintaining their fleet, residing in the consumer end of the technological flow. Sometimes for a minor off-the-manual modification or repair, we have to remain contained for solution from the concerned foreign manufacturer and hence flights get delayed, even cancelled. So its about time we should initiate designing our own aircrafts, beginning from the modeling in control aspect. Flight control design is a bit concealed and fairly complex. It depends largely on the type of airplane, it’s operating condition, it’s airframe, the actuation system, the signal processing system and the sensors that are associated with it. This thesis work confines the subject matter only on pitch control system of short range civil airplane. At first, a prototype of a very basic configuration was built. And then an autopilot was developed for that prototype. Simply in-flight stability was considered here, discarding route planning capability and take-off/landing scenarios. A model describing the dynamics of that prototype was derived using semi empirical method. Based on this model, a Proportional Integral Differential (PID) controller for longitudinal stability was developed. Though practical implementation of this controller did not take place, but it rendered a satisfactory result in real time simulation environment. Finally, cost assessment was done to estimate the feasibility of this design, extending an approximation for a carrier airplane.