Advanced Control Techniques for Full Scale Fatigue Testing

In the early 1990s, Australias Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) proved the effectiveness of a number of advanced compensation techniques while creating a custom load control system for the IFOSTP F/A-18 Empennage Fatigue Test. Developed to minimise test time and improve repeatability and loading accuracy, these combined techniques included non-linear gain scheduling, multi-channel feed-forward for cross coupling compensation, and non-linear load path compensation. This paper describes these performance-enhancing techniques and explores how DSTO is currently implementing these techniques using commercial off-the-shelf control technology on the 90 channel fullscale fatigue test of the BAE SYSTEMS Hawk Mk 127 aircraft.