MASS AND POWER ESTIMATIONS IN PRELIMINARY FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEM DESIGN

Abstract

Future aircraft will have to be lighter and more efficient to meet ongoing ambitions towards carbon neutrality as well as commercial demand. High aspect ratio wings are one way towards achieving more efficient commercial aviation. An important enabler for high aspect ratio wings are load protection functions, that are in turn implemented by multi-functional flight control systems. Introducing load alleviation functions has significant impact on the necessary system performance, components and architectures, since the flight control system (FCS) in it’s current implementation has a very strictly defined set of functionalities. Ultimately, accurate estimations of the resulting system’s viability, mass and power requirements will be vital to coming designs. Accurate estimations for safety critical systems, such as the FCS, have to cover architecture attributes resulting from redundancy concepts and functional extent. Our research aims to increase analysis capacities for FCS and aircraft systems in general in a collaborative multi-discipline aircraft design environment. This paper demonstrates the system mass and power estimation for such a FCS with it’s preliminary architecture design. The preliminary architecture design is part the DLR project oLAF and uses the generated iterations of aircraft design, including use cases and control surface layout, to give a tangible demonstration for the process. The aircraft design is an iteratively evolving aircraft design with an optimised wing employing load alleviation. The preliminary design of the FCS’s components was generated using various sizing models. The FCS architecture was modelled with Pacelab SysArc. The results of the system estimations of two iterations will be compared against one another and checked against mass estimation of classical system estimation methods. We propose, that early consideration of actual architecture candidates leads to more accurate estimates of realizable systems, and thus to more viable FCS and aircraft concepts.