Physics-based modelling for a closed form solution for flow angle estimation

Model-based, data-driven and physics-based approaches represent the state-of-the-art techniques to estimate the aircraft flow angles, angle-of-attack and angle-of-sideslip, in avionics. Thanks to sensor fusion techniques, a synthetic sensor is able to provide estimation of flow angles without any dedicated physical sensors. The work deals with a physics-based scheme derived from flight mechanic theory that leads to a nonlinear flow angle model. Even though several solvers can be adopted, nonlinear models can be replaced with less accurate but straightforward ones in practical applications. The present work proposes a linearisation to obtain the flow angles' closed form solution that is verified using a flight simulator. The main objective of the paper, in fact, is to analyse the estimation degradation using the proposed closed form solutions with respect to the nonlinear scheme. Moreover, flight conditions, where the proposed closed form solutions are not applicable, are identified.