Reconfigurable flight control design for combat flying wing with multiple control surfaces

With control using redundant multiple control surface arrangement and large-deflection drag rudders, a combat flying wing has a higher probability for control surface failures. Therefore, its flight control system must be able to reconfigure after such failures. Considering three types of typical control surface failures (lock-in-place (LIP), loss-of-effectiveness (LOE) and float), flight control reconfiguration characteristic and capability of such aircraft types are analyzed. Because of the control surface redundancy, the aircraft using the dynamic inversion flight control law already has a control allocation block. In this paper, its flight control configuration during the above failures is achieved by modifying this block. It is shown that such a reconfigurable flight control design is valid, through numerical simulations of flight attitude control task. Results indicate that, in the circumstances of control surface failures with limited degree and the degradation of the flying quality level, a combat flying wing adopting this flight control reconfiguration approach based on control allocation could guarantee its flight safety and perform some flight combat missions.