Modeling, Design, and Simulation Tools

This chapter looks closely at continuous-time state-space models, their properties, and how they are derived from physical systems. This leads to numerical methods and algorithms for computer software that can be applied to the many tasks associated with the simulation of an aerospace vehicle and design of its control systems. The software tools provide the capability to trim aircraft models for steady-state flight, perform digital flight simulation, extract linear state-space and transfer function descriptions of aircraft models, and perform linear control system design. The chapter provides two nonlinear state-space aircraft models in the form of source code. These models can be used to illustrate aircraft dynamic behavior and for control system design. The chapter also reviews the relevant classical control theory and design techniques for feedback control design.