Method of velocity controller design for an airbreathing hypersonic cruise vehicle

For air-breathing hypersonic cruise vehicles, the flight Mach number control is one of the important control system task. The velocity of the air-breathing hypersonic cruise vehicle is changed by the thrust from the integral ramjet engine. Due to the integral ramjet-engine combines the performance characteristics of both the hypersonic flight vehicle and ramjet engine, results in the difficulty in designing the velocity controller for an airbreathing hypersonic cruise vehicle. In this paper under the condition that the airbreathing hypersonic cruise vehicle dynamics is considered, the robust Mach number controller for an airbreathing hypersonic cruise vehicle is designed by using the H-infinity robust control method. The performance of the designed Mach number controller is evaluated with a Mach number command tracking simulation. The simulation and validation results indicate that the designed controller makes the Mach number control system have a very good performance. The effectiveness of the presented method is also demonstrated by the simulation and validation results.