Design of energy-based terrain following flight control system

Historically, aircraft longitudinal control has been realized by means of two loops: flight path (the control variable is elevator displacement) and speed control (the control variable is propulsive thrust or engine power). Both the elevator and throttle control cause coupled altitude and speed response, which exerts negative effects on longitudinal flight performance of aircraft, especially for Terrain Following(TF) flight. Energy-based method can resolve coupled problem between flight speed and path by controlling total energy rate and energy distribution rate between elevator and throttle. In this paper, energy-based control method is applied to design a TF flight control system for controlling flight altitude directly. An error control method of airspeed and altitude is adopted to eliminate the stable error of the total energy control system when decoupling control. Pitch loop and pitch rate feedback loop are designed for the system to damp the oscillatory response produced by TF system. The TF flight control system structure diagram and an aircraft point-mass energy motion model including basic control loops are given and used to simulate decoupling performance of the TF fight control system. Simulation results show that the energy-based TF flight control system can decouple flight velocity and flight path angle, exactly follow planned flight path, and greatly reduce altitude error, which is between +10m and -8m.