Control Allocation Approach Study for BWB Aircraft

Abstract

Blended wing body (BWB) aircraft usually equips with multi-group elevons for longitudinal and lateral control, those elevons have non-ignorable dynamic characteristics and tend to degrade the transient response to pilot command. However most control allocation methods do not account for effector dynamics, which is suitable for conventional aircraft but not for BWB. In order to handle the effector dynamics properly, four control allocation methods including explicit ganging, daisy chain, generalized inverse and dynamic control allocation are selected based on the guideline of choosing control allocation methods proposed by Boeing Company, then control allocators are designed based on those methods. The four control allocators are evaluated through command tracking and gust alleviation simulation, the simulation results imply that the dynamic characteristic of control surfaces have obvious effect on aircraft initial command response. Besides, the dynamic control allocation method have more potential than three other control allocation methods, but this method still needs further study to improve its performance.