SIL/HIL replication of electric aircraft powertrain dynamics and inner-loop control for V&V of system health management routines

Abstract

Software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing of failure prognostics and decision making tools for aircraft systems will facilitate more comprehensive and cost-effective testing than what is practical to conduct with flight tests. A framework is described for the offline recreation of dynamic loads on simulated or physical aircraft powertrain components based on a real-time simulation of airframe dynamics running on a flight simulator, an inner-loop flight control policy executed by either an autopilot routine or a human pilot, and a supervisory fault management control policy. The offline testing framework is described for the example of battery charge depletion failure scenarios onboard a prototype electric unmanned aerial vehicle.