Real-time system identification for fixed and rotary wing aircraft

This paper presents a novel technique for real-time system identification of fixed-wing aircraft during ground and flight operations. The proposed methodology can find a valuable application in support of aircraft certification, health monitoring and management as well as numerical model updating. The main purpose of this study is to demonstrate the effectiveness of Operational Modal Analysis for real-time modal parameter estimation. The two main advantages of the proposed system identification tool are that the input measurements and a priori knowledge of the system are not required. A cornerstone of the developed algorithm is the PLSCF estimator that it is computationally efficient and provides clear stabilization diagram; this simplifies the automation that is achieved by means of a multi-stage clustering process. The developed method is validated with data acquired from a fixed-wing UAV.