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Topic Name: TU Delft Research team demonstrates new control techniques for preventing aircraft crashes

Category: Aeronautical

Research persons: TU Delft Research Team

Location: Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

Details

TU Delft will demonstrate how improved control techniques can reduce the risk of aircraft crashes. The demonstration involves reconstructing troubled flights – such as the El Al flight which crashed in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam in 1992 – in a flight simulator and adding the newly developed technology.

The presentation in Delft forms the final phase of a research project involving the GARTEUR international research partnership (participants include TU Delft and the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR) into Fault Tolerant Control. This involves techniques for keeping damaged aircraft in the air for longer and enabling continuing flight control. The key to this is to improve control techniques which enable the aircraft to continue to be controlled. The implemented improvements are based on the analysis of flight data from aviation accidents by the NLR. This has led to improved interpretation of the (defective) condition of the aircraft.

On Wednesday 21 November, these improved techniques will be demonstrated to the general public at TU Delft. A number of realistic accident scenarios will be taken as examples, including the Bijlmer crash. These will be reconstructed using TU Delft’s Simona flight simulator, but this time also using the newly-developed control techniques. Simulator experiments have shown that the new techniques make it easier for the pilot to land seriously-damaged aircraft safely.

Incidentally, the new techniques are only expected to be introduced in practice in the long term. The new improvements can largely be attributed to the greater calculation capacity of computers and further progress in the underlying mathematical theory of the past few years. According to TU Delft, both military and civil aviation parties are displaying great interest in these developments.

Note for flight simulator

A flight simulator is a system that tries to replicate, or simulate, the experience of flying an aircraft as closely and realistically as possible. The different types of flight simulator range from video games up to full-size cockpit replicas mounted on hydraulic (or electromechanical) actuators, controlled by state of the art computer technology.

Flight simulators are extensively used by the aviation industry for design and development and for the training of pilots and other flight deck crew in both civil and military aircraft.

Engineering flight simulators are also used by aerospace manufacturers for such tasks as:
Development and testing of flight hardware. Simulation (emulation) and simulation techniques can be used, the latter being where real hardware is fed artificially-generated or real signals (sTimulated) in order to make it work. Such signals can be electrical, RF, sonar and so forth, depending on the equipment to be tested.

Development and testing of flight software. It is much safer to develop critical flight software on simulators or using simulation techniques, than development using aircraft in flight.

Development and testing of aircraft systems. For electrical, hydraulic and flight control systems, full-size engineering rigs sometimes called 'Iron Birds' are used during the development of the aircraft and its systems.

Note for Fault-tolerance

Fault-tolerance or graceful degradation is the property that enables a system (often computer-based) to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of (or one or more faults within) some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the severity of the failure, as compared to a naively-designed system in which even a small failure can cause total breakdown. Fault-tolerance is particularly sought-after in high-availability or life-critical systems.

Fault-tolerance is not just a property of individual machines; it may also characterise the rules by which they interact. For example, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is designed to allow reliable two-way communication in a packet-switched network, even in the presence of communications links which are imperfect or overloaded. It does this by requiring the endpoints of the communication to expect packet loss, duplication, reordering and corruption, so that these conditions do not damage data integrity, and only reduce throughput by a proportional amount.