Structural Problems of Aircraft Maneuvering at Hypersonic Speeds

Alexandru I. Stere
Aerospace Engineer
The Boeing Company, Seattle, WA, USA
alex.stere@aerospacexpert.com

Keywords: underactuated hypersonic aircraft, maneuver, structural thermal effects, aerothermoelastic

analysis

Mr. Brad Leland, the Hypersonics Program Manager at Lockheed Martin, once said: “Hypersonic aircraft,
coupled with hypersonic missiles, could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across
a continent in less than an hour” [1]. His statement best sums up the importance of researches focused on
those aspects of the hypersonic flight concerning agile combat maneuvering (evasion, pursuit and
engagement), supermaneuvrability, effective trajectory control and payload delivery.
During its high-speed maneuvers in the atmosphere, a hypersonic aircraft may become underactuated. This
can happen due to decrease in efficiency of some of its controls at high angles of attack (HAA), significant
structural deflections or structural failures at the level of control surfaces. At that moment, the vehicle is a
system that has partially or fully lost the effectiveness of some of its actuators that were designed to control
the vehicle along certain degrees of freedom.
Although several researchers already looked at the problem of aircraft underactuation [2, 3], even at
hypersonic speeds [2], their work mainly covered the design of the control systems for a rigid vehicle.
The present work focuses on the structural aspects that can lead to underactuation of aircraft maneuvering
at hypersonic speeds. The airframe of such a vehicle and its controls can exhibit aerothermoelastic
instabilities, which can be precipitated by the interaction of the high temperature-high pressure and unsteady
aerodynamic loads, in the framework of the losses of stiffness characteristics. These can result in
underactuation. Therefore, it is necessary to explore new structural solutions that can avoid these
occurrences.
The theoretical framework developed for the stated purpose is resulting in design criteria and sizing
equations that can lead to a robust outcome that can mitigate the effects of underactuation.

References
1. Steve Pace – The Projects of Skunk Works: 75 Years of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced
Development Programs, Voyageur Press, 2016
2. Zhi Wang, Weimin Bao, Huifeng Li – Second-Order Dynamic Sliding-Mode Control for
Nonminimum Phase Underactuated Hypersonic Vehicles, IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Electronics, Vol 64, No. 4, pp. 3105-3112, 2017
3. John Hauser, Shankar Sastry, George Meyer – Nonlinear Control Design for Slightly
Nonminimum Phase Systems: Application to V/STOL Aircraft, Automatica, Vol 28, No. 4, pp.
665-679, 1992