Ride Quality of Civil Aircraft from a Probabilistic Viewpoint

A novel approach is proposed for the analysis and design of the ride quality augmentation system for a civil aircraft. In contrast to the standard problem formulation, where a mean acceleration level is minimized, the ride quality level is quantie ed in a probabilistic framework. A method is dee ned to limit the probability of exceeding a given vertical acceleration level in one or more points of the aircraft. The novelty of the proposed approach lies mainly in the dee nition of the control design in a probabilistic framework, which gives deep physical insight to the problem and more realistic results. An example is discussed to illustrate the proposed approach where the controller is obtained through an eigenstructure assignment procedure; the robustness of the controlled structure is guaranteed through a linear matrix inequality formulation.