Nonlinear Robustness Analysis Tools for Flight Control Law Validation & Verification

Loss of control in flight is among the highest aviation accident categories for both the number of accidents and the number of fatalities. The flight controls community is seeking an improved validation tools for safety critical flight control systems. Current validation tools rely heavily on linear analysis, which ignore the inherent nonlinear nature of the aircraft dynamics and flight control system. Specifically, current practices in validating the flight control system involve gridding the flight envelope and checking various criteria based on linear analysis to ensure safety of the flight control system. The analysis and certification methods currently applied assume the aircrafts' dynamics is linear. In reality, the behavior of the aircraft is always nonlinear due to its aerodynamic characteristics and physical limitations imposed by the actuators. This thesis develops nonlinear analysis tools capable of certifying flight control laws for nonlinear aircraft dynamics. The proposed analysis tools can handle both the aerodynamic nonlinearities and the physical limitations imposed by the actuators in the aircrafts' dynamics. This proposed validation technique will extend and enrich the predictive capability of existing flight control law validation methods to analyze nonlinearities. The objective of this thesis is to provide the flight control community with an advanced set of analysis tools to reduce aviation fatalities and accidents rate.