Community Research and Development Information Service - CORDIS

ACFA 2020 deals with innovative active control concepts for ultra efficient 2020 aircraft configurations like the blended wing body (BWB) aircraft. The objective of the designed controllers is an ambitious improvement of ride comfort and handling qualities, as well as load reduction on BWB type aircraft. Due to the unconventional placement of control surfaces, BWB type aircrafts require multi-channel control architectures for manoeuvres as well as for active rigid body and vibration control. This is regarded as technology step compared to state-of-the-art single-channel controllers generally used for conventional aircraft configurations.

Moreover promising algorithms such as adaptive feed-forward control and neural network control for active control of BWB type aircrafts will be investigated in ACFA 2020. These multi-channel algorithms will be applied to the large flying wing aircraft designed in the VELA and NACRE project as well as to a newly designed ultra efficient 450 passenger aircraft. For this 450 passenger aircraft design a flying wing and an ultra wide body fuselage aircraft with carry-through wing box will be compared and the configuration which promises highest efficiency with respect to fuel burn will be retained for a more detailed design.