An approach of flight trim for wing-damaged asymmetric aircraft

Fault tolerant flight control (FTFC) technology has been researched for several decades. The purpose on developing and applying the technology in aviation is to improve the security and viability of aircraft. This paper mainly presents the flight trim analysis of wing-damaged asymmetric aircraft. In order to analyze the speciality of flight trim, the properties of aerodynamics and mass of damaged aircraft are introduced firstly. Then the establishment and simplification for equations of motion and flight trim are analyzed. Next the special numerical method of multidimensional Newton iteration for flight trim and its global convergences are analyzed. The end of this paper gives the simulation results of one small electric-powered UAV (SEPUAV) with 40% area moment of its left wing loss, and the ideal center region of trim points is obtained. This general trim method has been programmed and verified in the simulation environment preliminarily where the damage tolerant flight control (DTFC) technology will be validated ultimately.