INTEGRATED FAULT TOLERANT FLIGHT CONTROL DESIGN WITH APPLICATION TO AN F-16 AIRCRAFT

Afef Fekih

Keywords

Fault tolerant control, robust control, adaptive control, actuator faults, aircraft systems

Abstract

An integrated fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme, which combines the insensitivity and robustness properties of sliding mode control to certain types of disturbances and uncertainties with the accommodation properties of adaptive control to parametric and structural uncertainties is proposed in this paper for high performance flight control systems. The control algorithm is designed so that the sliding mode controller serves as a baseline controller and the adaptive controller will only be triggered if there are either actuator faults in the system or if a fault occurs that starts to make the sliding motion degrade so that the states evolve outside a given boundary. Under specific fault conditions, an estimation of the fault is obtained using a self-tuning method, alleviating therefore the need for a fault detection and isolation algorithm as required by active FTC approaches. The results obtained from implementing the control algorithm to an F-16 aircraft system subject to a set of fault patterns in different actuators show good performance under both nominal and faulty scenarios.

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