Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
A simplified output error method based on the Gauss-Newton minimisation technique is formulated in the frequency-domain and its application demonstrated for extraction of aircraft longitudinal parameters from simulated flight data. A study is carried out to show the effects on the accuracy of estimated parameters due to use of different input forms to generate the flight data, using different initial values to start the algorithm, presence of measurment noise in the flight data and fixing some weak parameters at a priori values. It is shown that the use of Packing Theorem to increase the sparsely sampled frequency data does not lead to better accuracy by the proposed method, as has been reported for the maximum likelihood method in the literature. Finally, relative advantages of the frequency-domain approach as against the time-domain approach are pointed out by analysing the same flight data in these two domains. It is shown that frequency-domain approach is better equipped to analyse noisy-data and can yield better estimates at reduced computational time.
Professor, Aeronautical Engineering Department.
Graduate student;now a Scientist 'B' at DRDL, Hyderabad, India.