Flight Vehicle System Identification (Hardback)

Flight Vehicle System Identification, Second Edition offers a systematic approach to flight vehicle system identification and covers exhaustively the time-domain methodology. Beginners, as well as practicing engineers, researchers, and working professionals who wish to refresh or broaden their knowledge of flight vehicle system identification, will find this book highly beneficial. It addresses in detail the theoretical and practical aspects of various parameter estimation methods, including those in the stochastic framework focusing on nonlinear models, cost function, optimization methods, and residual analysis. A pragmatic and balanced account of pros and cons in each case is provided. The book also presents data gathering and model validation, covering both large-scale and high-fidelity modeling. Real-world problems dealing with a variety of flight vehicle applications are addressed, and solutions are provided. Examples encompass such problems as estimation of aerodynamic stability and control derivatives from flight data, flight-path reconstruction, nonlinearities in control surface effectiveness, stall hysteresis, unstable aircraft, flexible aircraft model integrating rigid-body and structural dynamics, wake vortex encounters, and other critical considerations. Based on the author's years of experience, Flight Vehicle System Identification, Second Edition also provides recommendations for overcoming problems likely to be faced in developing complex nonlinear and high-fidelity models and can help the novice negotiate the challenges of developing highly accurate mathematical models and aerodynamic databases from experimental flight data. Software that runs under MATLAB and sample flight data are provided to assist the reader in reworking the examples presented in the text. The extended software is highly flexible to use and suitable for advanced applications; it can also be adapted to the reader's own interest. The second edition retains the same structure as the first edition with the following updates:
Revisions in Chapter 2 to include a more detailed discussion on the practical aspects of smoothing noisy data and of numerical differentiation. To suit individual cases, more options are now provided to choose from for handling data with different noise characteristics.
The second half of Chapter 4, dealing with the output-error method, has been thoroughly modified to describe the extended software that now caters to all of the extensions that were mentioned in the first edition. Examples have been added to demonstrate the new options. Through these extensions, the extended software provided with the second edition is now much more flexible and suitable for advanced modeling tasks.
The contents of Chapter 10 on data compatibility check are updated with additional examples.
Chapter 12, on selected advanced examples, expands on the case study on quasi-steady stall modeling with a different aircraft configuration, demonstrating efficacy of the simple model postulate for this unsteady aerodynamics phenomenon. It also expands on the wake-vortex aircraft encounter model to include recent advances in validating the aircraft interaction model. There is also a new case study on flexible aircraft modeling applying the time-domain methodology as discussed in the book. The model identified from flight data of a glider includes both the rigid body dynamics and the structural dynamics.