Fleet-Wide Variability for an Integrated Flight and Propulsion System

This Small Business Innovations Research Phase I project proposes a product development effort aimed at establishing procedures and software tools for quantifying the impact of component dynamic performance variability across a fleet of Integrated Flight and Propulsion Control systems (IFPC). We propose a set of innovative tools to guarantee dynamic performance, for full life, across a fleet of aircraft. The innovative feature of the proposed methods is that a few experiments or high-fidelity simulations are carried out on a small subset of a large number of propulsion controllers and the nearby controllers are validated or rejected using much simpler simulations. The performance criteria for variability analysis include thrust, stability margins, and failures. The evaluation will demonstrate the analytical feasibility assessment for a representative complex high bandwidth propulsion control problem. In Phase I, the developed techniques will be applied to a Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing (STOVL) example. Prototype validation algorithms will be developed in an industrial software environment. In Phase II, technology developed at SC Solutions and UCSD will be made into a prototype software product and will be demonstrated on a problem that can be scaled to a full-sized IFPC system. The potential for wide-ranging commercial applications is very significant since we will be developing the first-ever commercially available validation tool.