Rotorcraft system identification: a time/frequency domain approach

The availability of accurate models for helicopter aeromechanics is becoming more and more important, as rotorcraft flight control systems have to meet progressively more stringent performance requirements: as the required control bandwidth increases, model accuracy becomes a vital part of the design problem. In this paper, the results of a joint industry-academia research project aimed at developing a novel time/frequency domain approach to rotorcraft model identification will be presented and discussed. The proposed approachwill be illustrated bymeans of a case study based on data collected during piloted simulations of a state-of-the-art flight dynamics code.