Fault Tolerant Flight Control, a Physical Model Approach

Abstract

Safety is of paramount importance in all transportation systems, but especially in civil aviation. Therefore, in civil aviation, a lot of developments focus on the improvement of safety levels and reducing the risks that critical failures occur. When one analyses recent aircraft accident statistics, it is clear that a significant portion is attributed to “loss of control in flight”. A recent worldwide civil aviation accident survey for the 1989 to 2003 period, conducted by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Netherlands (CAA-NL) and based on data from the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR, indicates that this category accounts for as much as 17% of all aircraft accident cases. This has led to a common conclusion: from a flight dynamics point of view, with the technology and computing power available on this moment, it might have been possible to recover a part of the aircraft in the accident category described above on the condition that non-conventional control strategies would have been applied. These non-conventional control strategies involve the so-called concept of fault tolerant flight control (FTFC), where the control system is capable to detect and adapt for changes in the aircraft behaviour. One FTFC strategy option is using a model based control routine. This research focuses on a physical modular approach. In this setup, not only a reconfiguring controller is needed, but also a suitable FDI/identification strategy. This research focuses on both components. In this reseach project, a real-time aerodynamic model identification procedure has been combined with a model based adaptive control method. A manual as well as an autopilot version have been developed. The autopilot version has been evaluated on desktop simulations, the manual version has been tested in the Simona Research Simulator involving professional airline pilots. Both tests have demonstrated promising results. The autopilot performance is very good, and the manual controller has demonstrated to increase handling qualities and to reduce pilot workload of the damaged aircraft. These are very promising results that motivate further research in this field.