Development of a System Identification Tool for Subscale Flight Testing

Abstract: Aircraft system identification has been widely used to this day in applications like control law design, building simulators or extending flight envelopes. It can also be utilized for determining flight-mechanical characteristics in the preliminary design phase of a flight vehicle. In this thesis, three common time-domain methods were implemented in MATLAB for determining the aerodynamic derivatives of a subscale aircraft. For parameter estimation, the equation-error method is quick, robust and can provide good parameter estimates on its own. The output-error method is computationally intensive but keeps account of the aircraft's evolution in time, being more suitable for fine-tuning predictive models. A new model structure is identified using multivariate orthogonal functions with a predicted squared error stopping criteria. This method is based on linear regression (equation-error). The code written is flexible and can also be used for other aircraft and with other aerodynamic models. Simulations are compared with experimental data from a previous flight test campaign for validation. In the future, this tool may help taking decisions in conceptual design after a prototype is tested.