Am. Inst. of Aero. & Astro.

Basic MATLAB, Simulink, and Stateflow.

Colgren (aerospace engineering, U. of Kansas) presents a textbook for a 40-hour course introducing the language for technical computing in a computer laboratory environment where students work with the instructor in real time on the examples. He has also used the material in a variety of formats, however, and suggests it could even be used for self-study. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Modeling and simulation of aerospace vehicle dynamics, 2d ed.

Aerospace engineer Zipfel (U. of Florida) takes a two track approach to teaching modeling and simulation to aerospace students and professionals. First, he deals with invariant modeling of flight dynamics, laying out the mathematical foundations of modeling with Cartesian tensors, matrices, and coordinate systems. This part of the text uses the rotational time derivative and the Euler transformation of frames to formulate equations of motions in tensor form, Newton's law to yield the translational equations, and Euler's law to produce the attitude equations. Perturbation equations and aerodynamic derivatives complete the discussion of modeling. The second part applies these concepts to computer simulations of aerospace vehicles, from simple three-degrees-of-freedom trajectory simulations of hypersonic aircraft, rockets, and single-stage-to-orbit vehicles to six-degrees-of-freedom simulations of hypersonic aircrafts and missiles. He matches aerodynamics, autopilots, actuators, inertial navigation systems, and seekers with the full translational and attitude equations of motion. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)