Olivier Montagnier

Nonlinear analysis and control of an aircraft in the neighbourhood of deep stall

When an aircraft is locked in a stable equilibrium at high angle-of-attack, we have to do with the so-called deep stall which is a very dangerous situation. Airplanes with T-tail are mainly concerned with this phenomenon since the wake of the main wing flows over the horizontal tail and renders it ineffective but other aircrafts such as fighters can also be affected.First the phase portrait and bifurcation diagram are determined and characterized (with three equilibria in a deep stall prone configuration). It allows to diagnose the configurations of aircrafts susceptible to deep stall and also to point out the different types of time evolutions. Several techniques are used in order to determine the basin of attraction of the stable equilibrium at high angle-of-attack. They are based on the calculation of the stable manifold of the saddle-point equilibrium at medium angle-of-attack.Then several ways are explored in order to try to recover from deep stall. They exploits static features (such as curves of pitching moment versus angle-of-attack for full pitch down and full pitch up elevators) or dynamic aspects (excitation of the eigenmodes and improvement of the aerodynamic efficiency of the tail).Finally, some properties of a deep stall prone aircraft are pointed out and some control tools are also implemented. We try also to apply this mathematical results in a concrete situation by taking into account the captors specificities or by estimating the relevant variables thanks to other available information.