Quantifying and Scaling Airplane Performance in Turbulence.

Abstract

This dissertation studies the effects of turbulent wind on airplane airspeed and normal load factor, determining how these effects scale with airplane size and developing envelopes to account for them. The results have applications in design and control of aircraft, especially small scale aircraft, for robustness with respect to turbulence. Using linearized airplane dynamics and the Dryden gust model, this dissertation presents analytical and numerical scaling laws for airplane performance in gusts, safety margins that guarantee, with specified probability and logarithmic residence time, that steady flight can be maintained when stochastic wind gusts act upon an airplane, and envelopes to visualize these safety margins.

Presented here for the first time are scaling laws for the phugoid natural frequency, phugoid damping ratio, airspeed variance in turbulence, and flight path angle variance in turbulence. The results show that small aircraft are more susceptible to high frequency gusts, that the phugoid damping ratio does not depend directly on airplane size, that the airspeed and flight path angle variances can be parameterized by the ratio of the phugoid natural frequency to a characteristic turbulence frequency, and that the coefficient of variation of the airspeed decreases with increasing airplane size. Accompanying numerical examples validate the results using eleven different airplanes models, focusing on NASA's hypothetical Boeing 757 analog the Generic Transport Model and its operational 5.5% scale model, the NASA T2.

Also presented here for the first time are stationary flight, where the flight state is a stationary random process, and the stationary flight envelope, an adjusted steady flight envelope to visualize safety margins for stationary flight. The dissertation shows that driving the linearized airplane equations of motion with stationary, stochastic gusts results in stationary flight. It also shows how feedback control can enlarge the stationary flight envelope by alleviating gust loads, though the enlargement is significantly limited by control surface saturation. The results end with a numerical example of a Navion general aviation aircraft performing various steady flight maneuvers in moderate turbulence, showing substantial reductions in the steady flight envelope for some combinations of maneuvers, turbulence, and safety margins.