31,436 research outputs found
Feedback laws for fuel minimization for transport aircraft
The Theoretical Mechanics Branch has as one of its long-range goals to work toward solving real-time trajectory optimization problems on board an aircraft. This is a generic problem that has application to all aspects of aviation from general aviation through commercial to military. Overall interest is in the generic problem, but specific problems to achieve concrete results are examined. The problem is to develop control laws that generate approximately optimal trajectories with respect to some criteria such as minimum time, minimum fuel, or some combination of the two. These laws must be simple enough to be implemented on a computer that is flown on board an aircraft, which implies a major simplification from the two point boundary value problem generated by a standard trajectory optimization problem. In addition, the control laws allow for changes in end conditions during the flight, and changes in weather along a planned flight path. Therefore, a feedback control law that generates commands based on the current state rather than a precomputed open-loop control law is desired. This requirement, along with the need for order reduction, argues for the application of singular perturbation techniques
Piloted simulation of an algorithm for onboard control of time-optimal intercept
A piloted simulation of algorithms for onboard computation of trajectories for time-optimal intercept of a moving target by an F-8 aircraft is described. The algorithms, use singular perturbation techniques, generate commands in the cockpit. By centering the horizontal and vertical needles, the pilot flies an approximation to a time-optimal intercept trajectory. Example simulations are shown and statistical data on the pilot's performance when presented with different display and computation modes are described
Flow properties of a series of experimental thermoplastic polymides
The softening temperature to degradation temperature range of the polymers was about 440 to 650 K. All of the polymers retained small amounts of solvent as indicated by an increase in T(sub g) as the polymers were dried. The flow properties showed that all three polymers had very high apparent viscosities and would require high pressures and/or high temperatures and/or long times to obtain adequate flow in prepregging and molding. Although none was intended for such application, two of the polymers were combined with carbon fibers by solution prepregging. The prepregs were molded into laminates at temperatures and times, the selection of which was guided by the results from the flow measurements. These laminates had room temperature short beam shear strength similar to that of carbon fiber laminates with a thermosetting polyimide matrix. However, the strength had considerable scatter, and given the difficult processing, these polymides probably would not be suitable for continuous fiber composites
Simulation of a Hybrid Optical/Radio/Acoustic Extension to IceCube for EeV Neutrino Detection
Astrophysical neutrinos at EeV energies promise to be an interesting
source for astrophysics and particle physics. Detecting the predicted
cosmogenic (``GZK'') neutrinos at 10 - 10 eV would test models of
cosmic ray production at these energies and probe particle physics at 100
TeV center-of-mass energy. While IceCube could detect 1 GZK event per
year, it is necessary to detect 10 or more events per year in order to study
temporal, angular, and spectral distributions. The IceCube observatory may be
able to achieve such event rates with an extension including optical, radio,
and acoustic receivers. We present results from simulating such a hybrid
detector.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; to appear in the Proceedings of the 29th ICRC,
Pune, Indi
Giant Fluctuations of Coulomb Drag in a Bilayer System
We have observed reproducible fluctuations of the Coulomb drag, both as a
function of magnetic field and electron concentration, which are a
manifestation of quantum interference of electrons in the layers. At low
temperatures the fluctuations exceed the average drag, giving rise to random
changes of the sign of the drag. The fluctuations are found to be much larger
than previously expected, and we propose a model which explains their
enhancement by considering fluctuations of local electron properties.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure
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