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Aerospace Engineering

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Control

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Mitigating Crack Propagation In A Highly Maneuverable Flight Vehicle Using Life Extending Control Logic, Mohamed Mostafa Yousef Bassyouny Elshabasy Apr 2009

Mitigating Crack Propagation In A Highly Maneuverable Flight Vehicle Using Life Extending Control Logic, Mohamed Mostafa Yousef Bassyouny Elshabasy

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In this research, life extending control logic is proposed to reduce the cost of treating the aging problem of military aircraft structures and to avoid catastrophic failures and fatal accidents due to undetected cracks in the airframe components. The life extending control logic is based on load tailoring to facilitate a desired stress sequence that prolongs the structural life of the cracked airframe components by exploiting certain nonlinear crack retardation phenomena. The load is tailored to include infrequent injections of a single-cycle overload or a single-cycle overload and underload. These irregular loadings have an anti-intuitive but beneficial effect, which has …


Integrated Control Of Thermally Distorted Large Space Antennas, Robert H. Tolson Oct 1990

Integrated Control Of Thermally Distorted Large Space Antennas, Robert H. Tolson

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Studies on controlling the thermal distortion of large space antennae have generally investigated a single orbital position and have optimized actuator locations based on minimizing the RMS surface deviation from the original parabolic shape. One study showed the benefits of directly using far zone electric field characteristics as the performance measure; but, this approach resulted in a nonlinear programming problem. The objective of the current study is to develop an approach to designing a control system that (1) recognizes the time dependence of the distortion and (2) controls variables that are directly related to far field performance in a quadratic …