Jahresbericht 2017

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Selected Highlights 2017
Institute of Lightweight Structures
Flaps and movable devices of aircraft show gaps and
discontinuities, which result in additional drag and noise
among other effects. The design, manufacturing and
testing of flexible, shape-adaptive structures were at the
center of research at the Institute for Lightweight Struc-
tures, to close the gaps and increase the overall efficiency
of such systems.
Institute of Flight System Dynamics together with
TUM-IAS Focus Group ‘Aircraft Stability and Control’:
One key challenge for UAV is to ensure a safe flight, as
there is no pilot on board who could react to unexpected
behavior due to system failures, external disturbances
(turbulence, gusts) or model errors. Therefore, the Institute
of Flight System Dynamics together with the TUM-IAS
Focus Group ‘Aircraft Stability and Control’ developed an
innovative autoflight system (AFS) for SAGITTA which ena-
bles fully automatic flight missions from take-off to stand-
still after landing. Since the novel aircraft configuration
had never been flown before, it was a major design driver
for the AFS to cope with the widest possible spectrum of
model uncertainties. The researchers were rewarded with
extremely successful flight tests. Both flights of SAGITTA
could be accomplished fully automatically and demon-
strated excellent flying characteristics.
Besides the successful flight campaign a large amount of
expertise as well as conference publications and journal
articles have been provided to the public domain. With the
return of the demonstrator to Germany, the researchers
are eager to extract more valuable data from the success-
ful flights to further proceed in the research on UAVs.
Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Mirko Hornung
Aircraft Design
Phone +49.89.289.15981
Contact