Control allocation design and agility evaluation for fighter post-stall pitching maneuver

To achieve satisfactory pitch maneuverability under post-stall flight conditions with high angle of attack, standards for pitch agility evaluation are presented and a corresponding control allocation design is carried out in this paper. Firstly, a mathematical fighter model with multiple control actuators is introduced and the pitch control performances of the canards, the elevons and the thrust vectoring are compared for post-stall maneuvers. Subsequently, to obtain the maximal achievable trimmed angle of attack and realize a satisfied angle of attack tracking performance, a control allocation design with the canards, the inner elevons and the thrust vectoring is designed. Then a hybrid parameter optimization method which combines Nelder-Mead method and penalty function method is used to optimize the controller parameters. Finally, the simulation results show that remarkable post-stall pitch agility is achieved with the control allocation and parameter optimization design adopted in this paper.