Flight Test Bed Research Articles

Regional Multi-Mission Aircraft in Clean Sky 2: Environmental Impact and Actual Technologies Evaluation from Flight Tests

Airbus Defence and Space, former CASA, has lead the Regional Multi-mission aircraft configuration in the Clean Sky 2 program. The set of technologies selected for this platform have been matured with the support of multiple partners across Europe by means of theoretical studies, tests in laboratories, full scale on ground demonstration in rigs and in flight demonstration in the Regional Flight Test Bed 2 (FTB#2) platform based on an Airbus C295 aircraft. These technologies cover multiple aspects of the aircraft design, manufacturing and operations like innovative materials, systems architectures towards a more electrical aircraft, affordable flight control system devoted to control multiple control surfaces in the wing and new manufacturing and assembly processes. The outputs of the research are taken to evaluate the environmental impact in terms of gaseous emissions (fuel consumption, CO2 and NOx) and noise reduction in take-off and landing of future aircraft with respect of the reference configuration defined at the beginning of Clean Sky 2 program. This paper describes the environmental impact in future Regional Multi-mission configurations and the technology evaluation done with the flight test campaign of the Regional FTB#2 in 2022. The flight test campaign is a cornerstone milestone of the program to demonstrate the most mature technologies.

Thermoplastic composite penetration in the aerospace structures

FIDAMC(Fundación para la Investigación, Desarrollo y Aplicación de Materiales Compuestos) ,  has been investigating different technologies, under the frame of several research projects funded by Clean Sky initiatives and Spanish governmental entities, in order to demonstrate that  thermoplastic can be directly manufactured via automation without autoclave consolidation and the full integration of the structure by co-consolidation method fusing together the skin and stringers in only one melting step. Our Center is currently involved in an interesting project with a complete manufacturing solution of a thermoplastic wing skin using Automatic Fiber Placement (AFP) with assisted laser system as heating source techniques. This new Out-of-Autoclave procedure will be validated with ground/flying tests in 2020. This paper provides an overview of several research projects aimed to develop the automated lamination and in-situ co-consolidation technology and includes a review of automated methods to lay up PEEK prepreg from the first AFP head, in cooperation  with the Spanish supplier MTORRES and installed six years ago in FIDAMC, the evolution of this machine and the up-to-the minute configuration of new Multi-tows head to produce the feasibility demonstrator panel with co-consolidated "T" shaped stringers and scale up the methods to the final stiffened wing panel to incorporate in Clean Sky 2 as Flight test Bed developed by Airbus.

Indoor Multi-Camera-Based Testbed for 3-D Tracking and Control of UAVs

Flight testbeds with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are especially important to support research on multi-vehicle-related algorithms. The existing platforms usually lack a generic and complete solution allowing for software and hardware design. For such a purpose, this paper presents the design and implementation of a comprehensive multi-camera-based testbed for 3-D tracking and control of UAVs. First, the testbed software consists of a multi-camera system and a ground control system, which performs image processing, camera calibration, 3-D reconstruction, pose estimation, and motion control. In the multi-camera system, the positions and orientations of UAVs are first reconstructed by using epipolar geometric constraints and triangulation methods and then filtered by an extended Kalman filter (EKF). In the ground control system, a classical proportional–derivative (PD) controller is designed to receive the navigation data from the multi-camera system and then generates control commands to the target vehicles. Then, the testbed hardware employs smart cameras with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) modules to allow for real-time computation at a frame rate of 100 Hz. Lightweight quadcopter Parrot Bebop drones are chosen as the target UAVs, which does not require any modification to the hardware. Artificial infrared reflective markers are asymmetrically mounted on target vehicles and observed by multiple infrared cameras located around the flight region. Finally, extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate that the proposed testbed is a comprehensive and complete platform with good scalability applicable for research on a variety of advanced guidance, navigation, and control algorithms.

CAMUI Type Hybrid Rocket as Small Scale Ballistic Flight Testbed

CAMUI Type Hybrid Rocket as Small Scale Ballistic Flight Testbed

Electromagnetic Formation Flight Testbed Using Superconducting Coils

Electromagnetic Formation Flight Testbed Using Superconducting Coils