Robust Control for Air-Breathing Hypersonic Cruise Vehicles

The integral ramjet engine has gained wide popularity as one of the versatile air-breathing engines for hypersonic flight vehicles. Due to the uniqueness of tightly integrated engine-airframe configuration, results in significant coupling between the structure, propulsion system and vehicle aerodynamics, the hypersonic flight vehicle modeling and control system design become very challenging. For air-breathing hypersonic cruise vehicles, the flight Mach number control is one of the important control system task. In this paper under the condition that the air-breathing hypersonic cruise vehicle dynamics is considered, the robust Mach number controller for an air-breathing hypersonic cruise vehicle is designed by using the H-infinity robust control method. The simulation and validation results indicate that the designed controller makes the Mach number control system have a very good performance, the designed controller meets the Mach number control system performance and robustness demands. The effectiveness of the presented methods is demonstrated by the simulation and validation results.