Abstract

The long duration airborne feature of airships makes them an attractive solution for many military and civil applications such as long-endurance surveillance, reconnaissance, environment monitoring, communication utilities, and energy harvesting. To achieve a minimum energy periodic motion in the air, an optimal trajectory problem is solved using basic direct collocation methods. In the direct approach, the optimal control problem is converted into a nonlinear programming (NLP). Pseudo-inverse and several discretization methods such as Trapezoidal and Hermite-Simpson are used to obtain a numerical approximated solution by discretizing the states and controls into a set of equal nodes. These nodes are approximated by a cubic polynomial function which makes it easier for the optimization to converge while ensuring the problem constraints and the equations of motion are satisfied at the collocation points for a defined trajectory. In this study, direct collocation method provides the ability to obtain an approximation solution of the minimum energy expenditure of a very complex dynamic problem using Matlab fmincon optimization algorithm without using Himiltonian function with Lagrange multipliers. The minimal energy trajectory of the airship is discussed and results are presented.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2017

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Xu, Yunjun

Degree

Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering (M.S.A.E.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Degree Program

Aerospace Engineering; Space System Design and Engineering

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0006779

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0006779

Language

English

Release Date

8-15-2022

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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