Application of design of experiments for calibration of a flight simulator

The application of a flight simulator with six Degree of Freedom (6DOF)) in design and analysis of rocket systems is essential. The calibration of a 6DOF flight simulator is a challenging problem. This paper focuses on the calibration of a flight simulator and intends to answer the following questions:
1) Does experimental design have significant impact on calibration quality? If so, which experimental design is suitable for calibration of a flight simulator?
2) How to determine the suitable number of runs for calibration?
3) Could DOE be used for estimation of calibration parameters? If so, how is it applied?
The experiments have been conducted using a 6DOF simulator. Our investigation shows that the experimental design has significant impact on the quality of calibration. The suitable design for calibration of the 6DOF simulator is the triangular design. A new method for determining the number of runs is proposed based on entropy function. It is also used for estimation of the calibration parameters. One advantage of the proposed method is the calibration of 6DOF simulator by considering several criteria such as range error, azimuth error and combination of these errors. The quality of calibration has been investigated by hypothesis testing.