Modeling and Analysis of an Air-Breathing Flexible Hypersonic Vehicle

Abstract EN

By using light-weighted material in hypersonic vehicle, the vehicle body can be easily deformed.

The mutual couplings in aerodynamics, flexible structure, and propulsion system will bring great challenges for vehicle modeling.

In this work, engineering estimated method is used to calculate the aerodynamic forces, moments, and flexible modes to get the physics-based model of an air-breathing flexible hypersonic vehicle.

The model, which contains flexible effects and viscous effects, can capture the physical characteristics of high-speed flight.

To overcome the analytical intractability of the model, a simplified control-oriented model of the hypersonic vehicle is presented with curve fitting approximations.

The control-oriented model can not only reduce the complexity of the model, but also retain aero-flexible structure-propulsion interactions of the physics-based model and can be applied for nonlinear control.