Active fault tolerant control for vertical tail damaged aircraft with dissimilar redundant actuation system

Abstract

This paper proposes an active fault-tolerant control strategy for an aircraft with dissimilar redundant actuation system (DRAS) that has suffered from vertical tail damage. A damage degree coefficient based on the effective vertical tail area is introduced to parameterize the damaged flight dynamic model. The nonlinear relationship between the damage degree coefficient and the corresponding stability derivatives is considered. Furthermore, the performance degradation of new input channel with electro-hydrostatic actuator (EHA) is also taken into account in the damaged flight dynamic model. Based on the accurate damaged flight dynamic model, a composite method of linear quadratic regulator (LQR) integrating model reference adaptive control (MRAC) is proposed to reconfigure the fault-tolerant control law. The numerical simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant control strategy with accurate flight dynamic model. The results also indicate that aircraft with DRAS has better fault-tolerant control ability than the traditional ones when the vertical tail suffers from serious damage.