Modeling and switching control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicle with variable geometry inlet

In this paper, a multi-model switching control is developed for air-breathing hypersonic vehicle with variable geometry inlet(AHV-VGI). A variable geometry inlet with the translating cowl is adopted to capture the enough air mass flow for the scramjet engine, which can ensure a more powerful thrust. However, the using of VGI causes the unknown changes of the aerodynamics and thrust, making the model of AHV more complex. Therefore, we firstly analyze the thrust characteristic with the translating cowl and present the conception of optimal elongation distance of translating cowl(EDTC). Consequently, multiple different nonlinear aerodynamic models are constructed by curve fitting for each position of the translating cowl. Then, a switching mechanism dependent on EDTC is proposed and the adaptive RBF neural controllers are designed for velocity subsystem and altitude system of every model. Furthermore, the common Lyapunov functional is constructed to prove the stability of the multi-model switching process. Finally, numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach for AHV-VGI.