Equivalent dynamic modeling of flexible morphing aircraft

Abstract

A morphing aircraft can maintain optimal flight performance by adaptively changing shape. However, large deformation and fast motion of aircraft modules lead to complicated dynamics during morphing process. This paper proposes a mechanistic equivalent model with parameters identified by optimization method. Based on the dynamics of the aircraft modules with large deformation and fast motion and considering the coupling characteristics of rigid bodies and gimbal joints, an equivalent dynamic model of morphing aircraft is built in this study. Considering the huge amount of highly coupled parameters in the equivalent model, particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to identify the equivalent parameters based on the sample data of flexible model. By comparing the simulation results of proposed model to those of rigid model and flexible model, it can be seen that the accuracy of the proposed equivalent model is comparable to that of the flexible model, but the computational load is only 10% of that of flexible model. Further, based on this high-fidelity model with low computational load, an optimized morphing process is obtained, and the attitude variation during morphing is reduced by 4.23%.