Gust Rejection of a Supersonic Aircraft During Final Approach

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-2174.vid This paper presents a methodology based on optimal control to characterize the ability of a supersonic aircraft to reject atmospheric disturbances during its final approach to land. A longitudinal flight dynamics model is considered for which a set of rejectable disturbances is defined based on the values of three proposed barrier functionals. The problem of finding an admissible control input is then converted into a discrete nonlinear optimal control problem (NOCP) by defining an objective function based on an augmented discretized nonlinear dynamics that takes into account the disturbance models. It uses the Kreisselheimer-Steinhauser aggregation function to enable the application of gradient-based optimization methods. As an illustration, such an approach is applied to three different configurations of a supersonic business jet in the landing flight phase and under gust and turbulence disturbances.