SILHIL Replication of Electric Aircraft Powertrain Dynamics and Inner-Loop Control for V&V of System Health Management Routines

Software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing of failure prognostics and decision making tools for aircraft systems will facilitate more comprehensive and cost-effective testing than what is practical to conduct with flight tests. A framework is described for the offline recreation of dynamic loads on simulated or physical aircraft powertrain components based on a real-time simulation of airframe dynamics running on a flight simulator, an inner-loop flight control policy executed by either an autopilot routine or a human pilot, and a supervisory fault management control policy. The offline testing framework is described for the example of battery charge depletion failure scenarios onboard a prototype electric unmanned aerial vehicle. Brian Bole et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.