Generator Power Optimisation for a More-Electric Aircraft by Use of a Virtual Iron Bird

A prodedure is developed to minimise the generator design power within the electric power system of a future more-/ all-electric aircraft. This allows to save weight on the generators and on other equipment of the electic power system. Execution of the optimisation procedure by hand demonstrates the complexity of the problem. An automation of the process shows the capabilities of integrated modelling, simulation and optimisation tools

Preliminary Results for the Multi-Robot, Multi-Partner, Multi-Mission, Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Mount Etna

This paper was initially intended to report on the outcome of the twice postponed demonstration mission of the ARCHES project. Due to the global COVID pandemic, it has been postponed from 2020, then 2021, to 2022. Nevertheless, the development of our concepts and integration has progressed rapidly, and some of the preliminary results are worthwhile to share with the community to drive the dialog on robotics planetary exploration strategies. This paper includes an overview of the planned 4-week campaign, as well as the vision and relevance of the missiontowards the planned official space missions. Furthermore, the cooperative aspect of the robotic teams, the scientific motivation, the sub task achievements are summarised

Finally! Insights into the ARCHES Lunar Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Etna in summer 2022

This paper summarises the first outcomes of the space demonstration mission of the ARCHES project which could have been performed this year from 13 june until 10 july on Italy’s Mt. Etna in Sicily. After the second postponement related to COVID from the initially for 2020 planed campaign, we are now very happy to report, that the whole campaign with more than 65 participants for four weeks has been successfully conduced. In this short overview paper, we will refer to all other publication here on IAC22. This paper includes an overview of the performed 4-week campaign and the achieved mission goals and first results but also share our findings on the organisational and planning aspects

A Comprehensive Approach to Pulse Modulation for Attitude Control with Thrusters Subject to Switching Restrictions

A pulse modulation scheme based on two modulation curves is proposed for applications in spacecraft attitude control using thrusters which may be subject to switching restrictions. These constraints are taken into account explicitly during the design of the modulation scheme which can implement arbitrary bounded functions between constant modulator input and averaged modulator output

Two degree of freedom motion control of an energy optimized aircraft ram air inlet actuators

A high accurate position control structure for energy optimal actuation of an aircraft ram air inlet actuator is presented in this paper. The structure comprises a feedforward planning of the energy optimal reference motion profile, and a feedback position control with an inner loop for speed tracking control using a robust two degree of freedom (inverse disturbance observer) controller. The motion control structure is validated by simulation and experimental results under different load conditions

Virtual Iron Bird - A Multidisciplinary Modelling and Simulation Platform for New Aircraft System Architectures

The concept of a Virtual Iron Bird for the modelling of aircraft system architectures is presented. This platform can be used to evaluate and assess more-electric aircraft system configurations by simulations. For these purposes an object-oriented model library is set up by use of the modern multi-physical modelling language Modelica. Besides the design of the library, an inverse modelling approach is shown allowing to analyse the behaviour and power consumption of aircraft systems. In order to determine accuracy estimates of the overall results, Monte Carlo simulations of uncertainty models are performed, which identify the statistical distributions of the results and assessment criteria

A multi-objective optimisation-based software environment for control systems design

Multi-objective optimisation is a proven, well-known parameter tuning technique in control design. It is especially suited to solve complex, multi-disciplinary design problems. This paper describes a software environment, called MOPS (Multi-Objective Parameter Synthesis), which supports the control engineer in setting up his design problem as a properly formulated multi-objective optimisation task. To this end, MOPS offers a basic control system criteria library, a generic multi-model structure for multi-disciplinary problems and a generic multi-case structure for robust control law design, as well as visualisation tools for monitoring the design progress. Several additional features for dealing with a large amount of parameters and criteria, distributed computation for time consuming computations and the use of external simulation and analysis servers are also provided. MOPS also supports parameter estimation in identification problems and optimisation based design assessment for robustness. The user is provided with a clear application program interface and a graphical user interface both implemented in MATLAB. To solve the underlying optimisation problem different powerful optimisation procedures are available