Optimal bank reversal for high-lifting reentry vehicles

For high-lifting reentry vehicles, large tracking errors appear during the process of bank reversals, especially when the angular rate of the bank angle is low. An optimal bank reversal (OBR) approach is proposed in this paper mainly to solve this problem. The conventional bank reversal (CBR) which would cause large altitude tracking errors is simulated and analyzed on the high-lifting common aero vehicle (CAV) model. To minimize the tracking error during the bank reversal, a pre-control phase is added in the bank reversal process. This new OBR is designed based on the numerical trajectory prediction, and solved as a two-parameters optimization problem. Finally, in both nominal and dispersion cases, the CBR and the OBR approaches are simulated and compared. The proposed OBR approach is shown to own smaller altitude tracking errors during bank reversals, higher guidance precision for the terminal condition, and also good real-time performance.