Towards the Determination of the Dynamic Transition Corridor for Tandem Tilt-Wing Aircraft

Kurzfassung

Despite being the critical flight phase for tilt-wings, the transition maneuver is still not well understood in terms of aerodynamics and flight dynamics. Flight and handling qualities in this regime are primarily defined by the size and shape of the transition corridor, which describes physical limitations and other boundaries. To ensure safe, highly-automated transition maneuvers, these boundaries have to be provided for and maintained by both flight control and trajectory planning. Typically, the corridor is obtained based on static equilibrium trim analysis, which results in a conservative estimate that neglects the dynamic maneuverability of the aircraft. Based on the combination of optimal control and reachability theory, this paper presents an approach to determine the dynamic transition corridor. In a first attempt, the approach is applied successfully for the determination of the forward reachable set for forward level transition flight. In addition, a comparison of the results shows that a valuable first guess of the transition boundaries can be obtained with low level models and methods, i.e. a trim analysis with constant horizontal accelerations of a single tilt-wing. Furthermore, the results confirm flight dynamic characteristics of tilt-wing aircraft observed in previous work.