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Optimal Control of Aircraft Landing Gear

Preprint · January 2020

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11362.03523

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 Optimal Control of Aircraft Landing Gear
1st Syed Ather Abbas 2nd Dr.Zeashan Hameed Khan
Department of Mechatronics and Biomedical Engineering Dept. of Mechatronics and Biomedical Engineering
Air University Air University
Islamabad, Pakistan Islamabad, Pakistan
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract—This paper discusses the three control techniques i.e. A. Abbreviations and Acronyms
Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) control and State feedback
by pole placement method and Linear Quadratic Regulator
Damping ratio(Zeta), Proportional Derivative
to achieve certain performance requirements in controlling of Controller(PID), Linear Quadratic Regulator(LQR),
Aircraft landing gear. The Software used for the results, graphs Overshoot(O.S), Natural Frequency(Wn).
and simulation is MATLAB® and Simulink®. According to the
results all the controllers can control the system and improve B. Units
the performance however the state feedback by Pole placement • m meter
method gives better performance than the PID controller and
LQR controller on the basis of reduction in overshoot and settling • N newton
time.
Index Terms—Aircraft, Landing gear control, Pole Placement C. Methodology
controller, PID controller, LQR controller. The first step of making a controller is to derive the system
equation and the transfer function. Then the state space model
I. I NTRODUCTION is derived and finally one can proceed to the designing of the
Aircraft Landing Gear is an important component of aircraft controller. The three controllers implemented for this project
typically located in the bottom of the structure used for landing are controller design by pole placement method, the Pro-
and take-off and requires controller for proper control of dis- portional Integral derivative controller and Linear Quadratic
turbances. Landing gears are responsible for support of aircraft Regulator.
when it is not flying. Moreover it allows it to takeoff from the 1) State Space Model: To design a controller for a system,
land without damage to the primary structure. The wheeled one needs its equation called differential equation or alterna-
landing gears are very common on air-crafts but landing gears tively transfer function is needed. However with the increase
with skis and floats are also used for takeoff from water or ice. of complexity of the system, the equation becomes more and
The Landing gears (US) also called undercarriages (British) more complex, so in order to avoid this complexity we can
are generally retractable in fast moving planes to reduce the use State Space method. The State Space system is used to
drag force on the aircraft. In Boeing 737, among many other represent an nth order system into n equations of first order.
faults diagnosed 9% faults are due to the landing gear so This makes it easier to understand the system and design
a proper control technique are to be analyzed to provide a the controller. The State Space system is represented by the
solution to such problems [2].The controller designed in this following equations:
0
project is for a wheeled landing gear considering the Boeing X (t) = Ax(t) + Bu(t) (1)
737 has such landing gears. Two methods are employed for
controller design, the first one by pole placement method Y (t) = Cx(t) + Du(t) (2)
and second one using Proportional Integral Derivative Gain
Where X is state vector of order nx1. A and B are state input
technique.
matrices with order nxn, and nxr respectively. C is state output
matrix with order mxn, and D is direct coupling matrix of
order mxr. Usually we take it zero or null matrix. Y is mx1
output function and u is rx1 input scalar function.// One can
easily see that only two equations 1 and 2 are required to define
even a very complex system. The state space representation of
a plant is shown below:
2) System Diagram to State Space Model: The Landing
gear is modelled as a two mass, spring and damper system. If
one divides the structure of the Landing gear into two separate
Fig. 1. Aircraft Landing gear concentrated masses, the movement characteristics of each part
can be simulated in a better way, the two focused qualities are:
 Space Representation of a general plant.PNG

Fig. 2. State Space Representation of a general plant

(1) Elastic support quality mass: includes the upper part mass
of air spring of the buffer, for instance the fuselage, wing,
tail and finally the outer cylinder of the buffer. (2) Inelastic
support quality mass: mainly includes piston rod mass, brake
Fig. 4. Controller response to Step Input
device, tire, and finally the lower mass of the air spring. [3]
According to the model as shown in Figure 3, we have M1

Fig. 5. PID controller response to step input

Fig. 3. Mathematical Model of system

2) PID Controller: PID controller has achieved marked
which is the elastic model quality of the landing gear, M1 improvement when it comes to the overshoot, i.e. it has
is the inelastic model quality of landing gear, and K1 is the completely eliminated the overshoot. However it has a greater
stiffness. K2 is the tire stiffness coefficient of the landing gear, settling time of about 6 seconds.
y1 is the displacement of elastic mass, y2 is the inelastic 3) Linear quadratic regulator: A huge amount of improve-
mass displacement, and U is the control force of magnetic ment in terms of overshoot and settling time is observed when
rheological damper. The following matrices are extracted from the values of Q and R are changed to Q=100 and R= 0.000001,
the model ! given below: ! the settling time is reduced to 1.54 from 3.76 open loop.
˙
x1 0 1 0 0
Ẋ = ˙
x2 A= −k1/M 1 −cs/M 1 −k1/M 1 −cs/M 1 Moreover the overshoot is decreased from 105
˙
x3 0 0 0 1
˙
x4 ! k1/M 2 −cs/M 2 −(k1+k2)/M 2 −cs/M 2
0
−1/M 1
B= 0
1/M 2
C= (1 0 1 0) D = (0)

D. Results
The three control techniques were applied and the following
results were observed.
1) Controller design by Pole Placement: The poles were
placed the poles at the desired location with the parameters of
¡5% Over-shoot and settling time of 2s, the result verifies that
the settling time is 1.84s now which is faster than even 2 s
and the overshoot is about 10% so the controller has brought
the overshoot from 105% of open loop response to just 10%
which is a marked improvement. Fig. 6. LQR response to step input
 E. Conclusion
All the controllers showed marked improvement in the pa-
rameters of the system response, PID Controller has eliminated
the over shoot but has increased the settling time of the system
by about 4s. The LQR has reduced settling time to 1.54s from
3.76s open loop. Moreover the overshoot is decreased from
105% to 64.3%. The controller using pole placement is still
considered to be better here as it has decreased the O.S from
105% to 10.1% and reduced the settling time from 3.76s to
1.84s. It has shown improvement in both the settling time and
overshoot so we recommend use of controller 1 i.e. Controller
design by pole placement method.
F. Acknowledgement
The work on this project is dedicated to Dr. Zeashan
Hameed Khan and thank him for his guidance and help in
the making of this project. I would also like to thank Dr.
Habib who taught me the basics of control engineering during
my bachelors. Especial thanks to my current supervisor Dr.
Zeashan Hameed Khan who conveyed to us the practical
knowledge of control system models designing, motivated us
and made us learn a lot by giving us this project with proper
sense of guidance. Moreover, I would like thank my parents
and siblings for giving me motivation to complete this project.
R EFERENCES
[1] https://sassofia.com/blog/aircraft-landing-gear-reliabil
-ity-and-health-monitoring/.
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/landing
gear
[3] Optimal Control of Aircraft Landing Gear State Feedback
Based on Magneto rheological Damper by Li Fu1, Shuai Chen,
Xueshan Bai, Junhua Wang
[4] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gain-Scheduling-of-
PID-Controller-Based-on-Fuzzy-Singh
[5] https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/pid-control.html
[6]http://ctms.engin.umich.edu/CTMS/index.php?example=Motor
Speedsection=ControlStateSpace
[7] Linear system theory and design by Chi Tsong Chen 3rd
edition

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