| A disconnect of the flight dynamics and control discipline and its role in aircraft design and configuration development motivates the research presented in this dissertation. The current inability to capture design metrics related to vehicle dynamics, stability and handling, in a parametric and probabilistic manner leads to unacceptable limitations imposed on control and tail surface design. Furthermore, requirements relating to mission phases require immersion of the vehicle in its operating environment and cannot be addressed without stability and control considerations through simulation. To remedy such limitations, an improved design process incorporating dynamic modeling and simulation conducted in a parametric and probabilistic fashion is formulated. The resulting DynaMoS methodology and its nucleus, the parametric and probabilistic dynamic vehicle model, enable parametric and probabilistic measures of dynamic vehicle characteristics by means of dynamic analysis and flight simulation. As a proof of concept, DynaMos is applied to the design of a representative subsonic 150 passenger commercial transport. The methodology helps recognize a lack of technically feasible alternatives in the design space with respect to the short period longitudinal handling requirement. Costs associated with stability augmentation that may be necessary to render the design feasible are captured in the methodology by a simple formulation for the quantification of control costs by means of open-loop dynamic measures and dynamic inverse-controlled simulations. Lastly, the probabilistic approach enables a measure of the effects that uncertainty such as model fidelity and operational uncertainty have on the dynamic modeling and simulation process and the resulting design decisions. |
