Two Novel Control Methods for Aerodynamic Missiles

The report describes a study on two novel control principles for compact wingless missiles, primarily without high demands on maneuverability. In one of the cases the missile is controlled by tilting the nose and in the other case by folding in and out of the body small canard control surfaces, which have a fixed angle relative to the body x-axis. The study was carried out in the form of a short conceptual design phase, development of mass data and a complete aerodynamical dataset, and development of nonlinear controllers (autopilots) for flight dynamical analyses. The aerodynamical data was developed for the Mach numbers 0.8 and 1.5, and for angles of attack up to 30°. In these regions there is no publicly available data for these control principles. Both control principles work well and can be used for fast maneuvering, provided one restricts the cross acceleration to levels that correspond to trajectory correction (in the order of 1g). For such applications the studied control methods also mean that the guided missiles have very low aerodynamical drag. The tilting nose missile concept can also be used for more agile maneuvering at higher levels of cross acceleration but for this a more refined aerodynamical design is required with close to neutral aerodynamical stability. For the flipping canards missile, however, there are hard constraints on the achievable cross accelerations regardless of the details in the aerodynamical design.