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Online Safe Flight Envelope Protection for Icing Aircraft Based on Reachability Analysis

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Abstract

Icing encountered by an aircraft in flight can pose a great threat to flight safety, which is the foremost concern in aviation. Ice accretion has nonlinear and coupling properties, and therefore, a conventional envelope protection system cannot successfully deal with the condition. A safe flight envelope based on reachability analysis is proposed in this paper as a basis for designing an online envelope protection system for aircraft under icing conditions. This system uses a neural network method to identify changes in the aerodynamic coefficients and to classify the degrees of icing and uses a database-driven approach to solve the onboard safe flight envelope computation problem. The database of icing safe flight envelopes is created offline and can be retrieved in real time. The Research Civil Aircraft Model (RCAM) encountering icing conditions in the climbing phase was taken as an example to verify the feasibility of the online safe flight envelope protection system. The simulation results showed that the system can classify the degrees of icing efficiently, prevent the aircraft from deviating from the safe flight envelope, guide it back to the envelope along the fastest path, and reduce the risk of loss of control under icing conditions.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (No. 2015CB755805).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aeronautics Engineering College, Air Force Engineering University, Xi’an, China

    Zhilong Yu, Yinghui Li, Wenfeng Xu & Zehong Dong

  2. Chinese Flight Test Establishment, Xi’an, China

    Zhe Zhang

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  1. Zhilong Yu
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  2. Yinghui Li
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  3. Zhe Zhang
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Correspondence to Yinghui Li or Zhe Zhang.

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Yu, Z., Li, Y., Zhang, Z. et al. Online Safe Flight Envelope Protection for Icing Aircraft Based on Reachability Analysis. Int. J. Aeronaut. Space Sci. 21, 1174–1184 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42405-020-00266-7

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