Development and validation of digital twin to design wing attitude controller

Development and validation of digital twin to design wing attitude controller

There is renewed interest in high-speed flight for commercial and defence applications. To achieve desired performance for stability and manoeuvrability these vehicles require highly effective control systems, mechanical actuators, and robust control strategies. The challenge of aircraft control law derivation has seen extensive research, however simulation-based approaches lack validation testing on real flight hardware and full-scale flight tests only take place late in the development process when design changes are prohibitively expensive. A coupled approach using both ground testing of subscale models and a Digital Twin of the dynamic and embedded system offers efficient control system design and valuable insight into practical flight control performance at the early stages of the development process. This paper presents the methodology employed to determine aerodynamic and dynamic characteristics for a subsonic wind tunnel model and the corresponding control-oriented modelling to generate the Digital Twin. To demonstrate the approach, a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) feedback controller was developed using the Digital Twin and corresponding gain settings were applied to the experimental model. Using a test case involving step changes in wing angle-of-attack it was shown that both systems responded consistently and the significant dynamic effects were captured accurately in the Digital Twin system representation.