The following is an exploration into the optimal guidance and control of gun-launched guided projectiles. Unlike their early counterparts, modern-day gun-launched projectiles are capable of considerable accuracy. This ability is enabled through the use of control surfaces, such as fins or wings, which allow the projectile to maneuver towards a target. These aerodynamic features are part of a control system which lets the projectile achieve some effect at the target. With the advent of very high velocity guns, such as the Navy's electromagnetic railgun, these systems are a necessary part of the projectile design. This research focuses on a control scheme that uses the projectile's angle of attack as the single control in the development of an optimal control methodology that maximizes impact velocity, which is directly related to the amount of damage in icted on the target. This novel approach, which utilizes a reference trajectory as a seed for an iterative optimization scheme, results in an optimal control history for a projectile. The investigation is geared towards examining how poor an approximation of the true optimal solution that reference trajectory can be and still lead to the determination of an optimal control history. Several different types of trajectories are examined for their applicability as a reference trajectory. Although the use of aerodynamic control surfaces enables control of the projectile, there is a potential down side. With steady development of guns with longer ranges and higher launch velocities, it becomes increasingly likely that a projectile will y into a region of the atmosphere (and beyond) in which there is not sufficient air ow over the control surfaces to maintain projectile control. This research is extended to include a minimum dynamic pressure constraint in the problem; the imposition of such a constraint is not examined in the literature. Several methods of adding the constraint are discussed and a number of cases with varying dynamic pressure limits are evaluated. As a result of this research, a robust methodology exists to quickly obtain an optimal control history, with or without constraints, based on a rough reference trajectory as input. This methodology finds its applicability not only for gun-launched weapons, but also for missiles and hypersonic vehicles. / Doctor of Philosophy / As the name implies, optimal control problems involve determining a control history for a system that optimizes some aspect of the system's behavior. In aerospace applications, optimal control problems often involve finding a control history that minimizes time of ight, uses the least amount of fuel, maximizes final velocity, or meets some constraint imposed by the designer or user. For very simple problems, this optimal control history can be analytically derived; for more practical problems, such as the ones considered here, numerical methods are required to determine a solution.
This research focuses on the optimal control problem of a gun-launched guided projectile. Guided projectiles have the potential to be significantly more accurate than their unguided counterparts; this improvement is achieved through the use of a control mechanism. For this research, the projectile is modeled using a single control approach, namely using the angle of attack as the only control for the projectile. The angle of attack is the angle formed between the direction the projectile is pointing and the direction it is moving (i.e., between the main body axis and the velocity vector of the projectile). An approach is then developed to determine an optimal angle of attack history that maximizes the projectile's final impact velocity. While this problem has been extensively examined by other researchers, the current approach results in the analytical determination of the costate estimates that eliminates the need to iterate on their solutions.
Subsequently, a minimum dynamic pressure constraint is added to the problem. While extensive investigation has been conducted in the examination of a maximum dynamic pressure constraint for aerospace applications, the imposition of a minimum represents a novel body of work. For an aerodynamically controlled projectile, (i.e., one controlled with movable surfaces that interact with the air stream), dropping below a minimum dynamic pressure may result in loss of sufficient control. As such, developing a control history that accommodates this constraint and prevents the loss of aerodynamic control is critical to the ongoing development of very long range, gun-launched guided projectiles. This new methodology is applied with the minimum dynamic pressure constraint imposed and the resulting optimal control histories are then examined. In addition, the possibility of implementing other constraints is also discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/102752 |
| Date | 17 March 2021 |
| Creators | Skamangas, Emmanuel Epaminondas |
| Contributors | Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Black, Jonathan T., Woolsey, Craig A., Farhood, Mazen H., Sultan, Cornel, Lawton, John A. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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