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A study has been conducted of reaction controls for VSTOL aircraft using thrust augmenting ejector techniques. Rapid mixing nozzles have been developed for high pressure ejectors. Mass flow increases for sonic nozzles of up to 50\ at x/D=8 were recorded, compared with plain circular nozzles. Their use was found to improve the thrust performance of a simple ejector by 9\, and larger increases are believed possible. Results from an ejector performance prediction model were successfully compared with experimental data. The use of rapid mixing nozzles in a practical ejector design has been assessed. It is predicted that a maximum thrust increment of 20\ ·could be achieved, compared with a simple fully expanded jet flow.

Integrated Modular Avionics standardises hardware and software platforms of Line Replaceable Modules (LRMs) and other system components in order to reduce the overall cost of system development. operation and maintenance. Several identical processing units within a cabinet. and fast communication media in the form of a backplane bus introduces further possibility of reconfiguring the system in terms of changing the applications performed by particular core LRMs. In this thesis a study into Reconfigurable Integrated Modular Avionics is presented. The main objectives of the project were to investigate the benefits, and feasibility of, employing autonomous dynamic in-tlight reconfiguration of the system as a means for providing fault-tolerance. In this approach, allowing processing modules to change their function permits the system to share the redundant modules as well as sacrificing less important avionics functions to sustain the more critical applications. Various architecture examples are reviewed in order to establish a system design that would support reconfiguration at a minimal cost. Two modified ARINC 651 architecture examples are proposed for implementation of dynamic in-flight reconfiguration. The benefits of reconfiguration are identified with the use of Markov state space analysis, and are found to be substantial with respect to the reduced number of redundant processing modules required to implement the system functions within the safety requirements. Suitable reconfiguration schemes are identified, and the most promising one is formally specified with the use of the Vienna Development Method. The safety properties of the scheme are shown based on the specification. In order to study the feasibility of autonomous dynamic reconfiguration, the scheme is implemented into two distinct systems, and the results of the practical observation of the system behaviour are presented and discussed. As the project was sponsored by the UK Civil Aviation Authority, a number of certification issues related to reconfigurable avionics systems are identified and discussed based on the practical implementation and previous theoretical analysis. It is concluded that dynamic in-flight reconfiguration of avionics systems can lead to substantial savings in terms of the reduced number of required core LRMs, and greater fault-tolerance than traditional non-reconfigurable systems

Any redundancy scheme in aircraft control systems is usually considered separately from the control algorithms involved. All feedback control systems are usually designed under the assumption that their sensors will not fail. When the integrity requirements demand it, then a redundancy scheme must be designed to provide any required measurements with only extremely short interruptions to normal service being caused by failures of individual sensors.

The methodology for the design of error-actuated digital set-point tracking controllers proposed by Porter and co-workers has emerged as a result of the pursuit of effective and practical solutions to the problem of designing digital control systems for unknown, dynamically complex multivariable plants with measurable outputs. In this thesis, such digital set-point tracking controllers and the resulting digital set-point tracking systems are enriched to embrace plants with unmeasurable outputs and plants with more outputs than manipulated inputs. In the study of the latter plants, the novel concepts of limit tracking (i.e. the tracking exhibited by plants with more outputs than inputs) is introduced and an associated methodology for the design of self-selecting controllers is proposed. Such controllers involve the selection of different set-point tracking controllers to control the most critical subset of plant outputs based upon the developed rigorous theoretical foundations for the limit-tracking systems. In such foundations, the classification of linear multivariable plants into Class I and Class II plants based upon their steady-state transfer function matrices facilitates the assessment of the feasibility of limit-tracking systems. Furthermore, the associated order-reduction technique simplifies the problem of deciding the minimum numbers of different subsets of plant outputs to be controlled by corresponding set-point tracking controllers. In addition, the dynamical properties of limit-tracking systems are also investigated using the phase-plane method and a methodology for the design of supervisory self-selecting controllers is proposed so as to prevent the occurrence of dynamical peculiarities such as limit-cycle oscillations which might happen in limit-tracking systems. The effectiveness of all the proposed methodologies and techniques is illustrated by examples, and the robustness properties of set-point tracking systems and limit-tracking systems in the face of plant variations and unknown disturbances are tested. Finally, self-selecting controllers are designed for a nonlinear gas-turbine engine and their practical effectiveness is clearly demonstrated.

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Wind-shear is a spatial or temporal gradient in wind speed and/or direction, and is generally associated with the presence of cold and warm fronts and thunderstorm cells. It is a serious hazard in the terminal stages of flight for all aircraft but for light aircraft in particular. The research work presented in this dissertation concerns the design of a wind-shear detection system which involved the application of estimation theory and digital simulation techniques. The wind-shear detection system was designed after a careful study of the results obtained from a digital simulation of an aircraft landing phase, including the effects of wind-shear.

Due to the unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution they offer, wireless sensor networks are considered an enabling technology for the distributed monitoring of industrial, military, and natural environments. As these systems migrate into vastly different and novel applications, new constraints are discovered that affect network reliability and utility. For example, wireless sensors are typically statically deployed and, unlike mobile systems, cannot move to a new location for better radio reception. As a result, the signal fades caused by non-optimal environmental conditions can increase the outage probability of the system, potentially rendering the network unreliable and ineffectual. Stochastic models that quantify link reliability and the effectiveness of diversity methods are often employed to understand the impact of such fading. However, the performance of these models applied to wireless sensor networks is entirely dependent on the appropriateness of the model with respect to the environment. This work first presents an empirical study of the propagation environment for a wingless, rotary aircraft, showing that the wireless environment within exhibits frequency-selective fading much more severe than predicted by current worst-case models (i.e., Rayleigh). An analysis is then given of the effectiveness of several diversity methods operating within such environments (referred to as hyper-Rayleigh). These fade mitigation techniques are simple enough to be employed for use with low-complexity wireless sensor hardware, and include spatial diversity, polar diversity, two-element passive combining, and two-element phased combining. Two-element phased combining is further developed by examining the effect that smaller element spacing has on diversity gain. A demonstration of a wireless