Elementary Flight Dynamics with an Introduction to Bifurcation and Continuation Methods [Kõva köide]

"Preface Flight mechanics lies at the heart of aeronautics. It is the point of confluence of other disciplines within aerospace engineering and the gateway to aircraft design. Almost every curriculum in aerospace engineering includes two courses in flight mechanics--one on applied aerodynamics and airplane performance and the other on airplane stability/control and flight dynamics. Having taught both these subjects for over two decades, the authors' experience can be summed up briefly in the following student response: 'These are the best subjects in the curriculum. When you teach it in class, everything is obvious, but when we go back and read the textbook, things get very confusing'. As we got down to decoding this statement, several questions emerged:- Why put students through the gruesome derivation of the sixdegree- of-freedom equations early in the course, preceded by the axis transformations, and followed by the small perturbation math, when the bulk of the course is focussed on the dynamic modesabout straight and level flight trim, which can be easily presented without going this route? - Would it not be nicer to write the equations for the second-order modes in a manner similar to a spring-mass-damper system? Then, one could read off the stiffness and damping directly, which would also give the conditions for stability. - The definitions of 'static' and 'dynamic' stability have been the cause of much student heartbreak. With the second-order form of the equations, the requirement of positive stiffness is the same as the socalled 'static' stability condition, so why not drop the separate notion of static stability entirely? -"--

Aerospace engineers Sinha and Ananthkrishnan present a textbook for an undergraduate course in flight dynamics within an aeronautics curriculum. In investigating complaints by students of earlier textbooks, they discovered that some fundamental formulas that have been used a century were wrong, and correcting them made everything much easier to understand. The book covers the stability concept, longitudinal trim and stability, longitudinal control, long-period (phygoid) dynamics, lateral-directional motion, lateral-directional dynamic modes, and computational flight dynamics. Annotation ©2014 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Many textbooks are unable to step outside the classroom and connect with industrial practice, and most describe difficult-to-rationalize ad hoc derivations of the modal parameters. In contrast,Elementary Flight Dynamics with an Introduction to Bifurcation and Continuation Methods uses an optimal mix of physical insight and mathematical presentation to lead students to the heart of professional aircraft flight dynamics in a pleasant and informative manner.

Presenting an updated version of the aerodynamic model with the corrected definition of the rate (dynamic) derivatives, the book is peppered with examples of real-life airplanes, real airplane data, and solved examples. It plunges directly into the core concepts of aircraft flight dynamics with minimal mathematical fuss. When the 6-degree-of-freedom equations are presented in the final chapter, the students are already familiar with most of the physical concepts and the math is easier to absorb.

Aimed at junior and senior undergraduate students, this book covers recent developments in airplane flight dynamics and introduces bifurcation and continuation methods as a tool for flight dynamic analysis. Designed to help students make the transition from classroom calculations to the real-world of computational flight dynamics, it offers a practical perspective, enhanced by the inclusion of an open source computational tool.