Control System Design for a Hypersonic Re-entry Vehicle

The contents of this report describe the control system design for a deployable entry vehicle. Entry vehicles that are utilized for sample return missions are traditionally large and heavy systems, which significantly limits the payload carrying capability of the mission. The development of deployable entry vehicles with reduced volume and mass was established to solve this problem. However, there are still many challenges associated with controlling these vehicles. This is the motivation for the topic of this report. The following sections include a brief literature review of the problem at hand to provide some background information on the problem as well as how it has been solved in the past. Following this, the design and analysis for a control system solution is presented. The dynamics of the system are modeled using a six degree of freedom simulation that is used to analyze the control system performance. The simulation utilizes aerodynamic loads computed from a computational fluid dynamics analysis. The control system is designed utilizing dynamic inversion in the control law to deal with the nonlinearities in the system. Two dynamic inversion schemes are implemented and tested. The simulation results verify that the control system design using these schemes is an effective method of controlling the hypersonic re-entry vehicle.