On-board statistical detection and compensation of anomalous pilot-aircraft interactions

A statistical method for the on-board detection and compensation of adverse oscillations in pilot-aircraft systems is presented. A recursively updated linear model representing the pilot-aircraft system is used to continuously check for stability loss. The instability-related oscillations are detected early, using a statistical hypothesis test. Furthermore, a specially designed stability augmentation system assists the pilot during the instability periods. The method's effectiveness is demonstrated via data obtained from a flight simulator and a detailed simulation model.     

The characteristics of sharp (small-scale) boundaries of solar wind plasma and magnetic field structures

We investigate properties of large (>20%) and sharp (<10 min) solar wind ion flux changes using INTERBALL-1 and WIND plasma and magnetic field measurements from 1996 to 1999. These ion flux changes are the boundaries of small-scale and middle-scale solar wind structures. We describe the behavior of the solar wind velocity, temperature and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) during these sudden flux changes. Many of the largest ion flux changes occur during periods when the solar wind velocity is nearly constant, so these are mainly plasma density changes. The IMF magnitude and direction changes at these events can be either large or small. For about 55% of the ion flux changes, the sum of the thermal and magnetic pressure are in balance across the boundary. In many of the other cases, the thermal pressure change is significantly more than the magnetic pressure change. We also attempted to classify the types of discontinuities observed.     

Simulation of a Rocket Engine Nozzle Discharge Coefficient

Multiparameter studies of the discharge coefficient dependence on the nozzle geometry and the presence of a condensed phase in combustion products were performed. The simulation results obtained satisfactorily agree with the well-known generalized data. The modern computational fluid dynamics methods were shown to be able to refine the generalized empirical relations.     

A debris image tracking using optical flow algorithm

This study proposes a motion detection and object tracking technique for GEO debris in a sequence of images. A couple of techniques (called the “stacking method” and “line-identifying technique”) were recently proposed to address the same problem. Although these techniques are effective at detecting the debris position and motion in the image sequences, there are some issues concerned with computational load and assumed debris motion. This study derives a method to estimate motion vectors of objects in image sequence and finally detect the debris locations by using a computer vision technique called an optical flow algorithm. The new method detects these parameters in low computational time in a serial manner, which implies that it has an advantage to track not only linear but also nonlinear motion of GEO debris more easily than the previous methods. The feasibility of the proposed methods is validated using real and synthesized image sequences which contain some typical debris motions.