Analysis on the effect of individual dynamical characteristics on the aircraft performance, stability, and control across flight envelope.

For aircraft flight mechanics application, linear system analysis provides an excellent advantage and powerful tools to design efficient aircraft control systems around desired operating conditions. It also provides under the proper excitation an excellent mean to detect unwanted extreme nonlinear behaviour such as limit cycles. The resulting linear state-space model from the general nonlinear state-space system produces four linear matrices A, B, C, and D around a specific operating condition. Matrices A and B are the 1st partial derivatives of the nonlinear state derivative with respect to the state and control input variable, respectively. Matrices C and D are the 1st partial derivatives of the nonlinear output function with respect to the state and control input variable, respectively. These linear matrices embed the system dynamics and preliminary investigation showed that the components of these matrices can be partitioned uniquely into blocks according to distinct system dynamic characteristics [1]. The study shall exploit in detail this uniqueness and the effect of a specific dynamic characteristic on the overall system performance, response, stability and control for the application of aircraft flight mechanics. The new concept of nonlinearity index as a systematic mean to asses an aircrafts nonlinearity shall be investigated in conjunction with this unique block partitioning to determine the effect of individual dynamical characteristic towards the overall nonlinearly of the aircraft.