Patent ID: 8706460

Claim:
A method of modeling dynamic characteristics of a flight vehicle, comprising: collecting input data including a plurality of flight vehicle parameters at a fixed flight condition and effector data including a plurality of engine parameters and control surface aero coefficients; collecting actuator parameters defining dynamic models of flight vehicle effectors generating effector motion, as a function of an input command, translated into forces and moments acting on a flight vehicle in motion; computing a mixing-logic gain matrix, based on vehicle geometry and the effector data, configured to decouple vehicle angular and linear acceleration motion in at least roll, pitch, and yaw directions generating control forces acting upon flight vehicle engines and control surfaces; generating a deterministic flight vehicle state-space model from the input data and the effector data that predicts behavior of the flight vehicle in response to at least one of external disturbance inputs and flight control inputs; generating a deterministic actuator model from the actuator parameters defining dynamic models of flight vehicle effectors generating effector motion, the deterministic actuator model defining motion of a flight vehicle engine or a control surface in response to actuator input commands from a flight control system output; generating a flight control state-space model from an output of the mixing logic gain matrix, the flight control state-space model including control loops at a basis of one control loop per axis of angular and linear acceleration; combining the flight vehicle state-space model, the actuator model, and the flight control state-space models together to generate one or more combination dynamic models for a flight vehicle configuration and at a specified degree of complexity, the combining the flight vehicle state-space model, the actuator model, and the flight control system state-space models further including creating a combined state-space representation of the flight vehicle state-space model, the actuator model, and the flight control state-space models at a fixed flight condition defined by one or more actuator parameters acting on a vehicle engine or control surface, the combined state-space representation defined by a linear system comprised of a set of four matrices derived from the input data, the effector data, the actuator data, and the output of the mixing-logic gain matrix, and numerically solving the set of four matrices to determine a dynamic behavior of the combined -space representation in response to the at least one of external disturbance inputs and flight control inputs; and performing one or more simulations to evaluate flight vehicle performance and control design within the specified degree of complexity.