Posture control of electromechanical-actuator-based thrust vector system for aircraft engine

This paper deals with the dynamical modeling and posture control of the electromechanical actuator (EMA)-based thrust vector control (TVC) system for aircraft engines. Addressing the issues of the large inertia and low stiffness existing in the TVC system driven by EMA, this paper established a 2-DOF mathematical model to describe the EMA dynamic characteristics. In order to overcome the influence of the motion coupling of the TVC-EMA existing in the pitching and yawing channels, we presented a kind of dual-channel coordinated-control method which realizes the TVC for the swung aircraft engine based on the inverse kinematics. This control strategy uses the command Euler's angle transformation to solve the desired actuator linear lengths and tracks the desired lengths via the compound control law composed of robust PID, with the lead compensation and bang-bang control in the two actuators. The hybrid experimental simulation system based on dSPACE was set up, the control parameters of the compound control methods were confirmed by offline simulation based on MATLAB, and the load experiments of circular motion and step response were implemented on the test system. The simulation and test results show that the designed thrust vector controller can achieve the satisfactory control performances.