Optimization on steady-state cruise for a hypersonic vehicle

This paper concentrates on optimization of the steady-state cruise for a hypersonic vehicle. The steady-state cruise is a state with constant altitude and velocity during the flight. The ratio of fuel consumption to the range over a given period of time is defined as the fuel rate, which is the objective of this fuel optimized problem in this work. The optimal steady-state cruise is determined by minimizing the fuel rate with multi-constraints including boundary constraints of states and path constraints. Since this work needs to find the global solution satisfying the nonlinear constraints, we can apply particle swarm optimization(PSO) combined with the sequential quadratic programming(SQP) to find the optimal solution. Thus, this strategy takes the advantage of intelligent optimization algorithms with global search ability and SQP with high precision and handled constraint ability. A demonstration example results show good performance of fuel savings on the nonlinear model of the hypersonic vehicle.