Dynamics and control

Eyes in the skies
Aviation, Dynamics and control

Eyes in the skies

Investigating the ever-growing and flourishing uses of UAVs in agriculture Author: Arham Elahi, Leonardo Times Editor and Naomi Lijesen, Final Editor EAvision’s 30X agricultural drone demonstrating spraying capabilities. Optimizing the agricultural industry is of the utmost importance. Currently, we technically have enough food on the planet to sustain everyone, even though it is tragic that it is not equally distributed. However, the current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to grow by a third, or 2.3 billion, by 2050 - thus, global food production must rise by about 70% to meet this demand [1][2]. Of course, clearing such an enormous area of land to facilitate more agriculture is not a sustainable solution when considering climate change and the strain humans put on t...
System Identification in Aerospace
Aviation, Dynamics and control

System Identification in Aerospace

Engineering relies heavily on mathematical models of real systems. However, physical processes are often highly complex and not entirely understood, so the modeling of the first principles can be challenging, sometimes even impossible. System identification allows for any system, however complex or obscure, to be modeled solely on the basis of measurements. System identification is the science of extracting a model from a set of observations or measurements. By looking at how a system behaves in specific situations, we can determine whether there are patterns in the behaviour and what factors influence it. The underlying idea is to formulate a basic model structure containing a number of unknown parameters, and then estimate these parameters such that the difference between measurements...
Plasma Enhanced Aerodynamics
Aerodynamics and wind energy, Aviation, Dynamics and control

Plasma Enhanced Aerodynamics

An experimental study on plasma characteristics Active flow control by the use of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuators has been proven to be a promising concept for the delay and even elimination of boundary layer separation. Both the simplicity of the system as well as the potential for flow and even flight control make plasma actuators increasingly interesting for research in aerodynamics worldwide.   Plasma actuators for flow control In the past few years, the term plasma actuator has made its entry into the aerodynamics’ flow control jargon. In this field, two different types of dielectric barrier discharge actuators are currently investigated. Alternating current (AC-DBD) and nanosecond pulsed direct current (ns-DBD) plasmas differ in terms of input vol...