Adaptive fault tolerance flight controller for aircraft actuator failure

Abstract

This research presents a model reference adaptive controller (MRAC)-based fault tolerable flight control system (FTFCS) for commercial aircraft. Many sophisticated controllers are having good performance within the safety limit, but these controllers are unable to maintain their performance during a malfunction of actuators, sensors, or other control system’s components. The FTFCS are introduced to overcome these aforementioned difficulties through considering the fault as uncertainty and compensate the failures that lead to achieve satisfactory performance during actuator failure with the help of active flight control surface. The general aircraft model with independent control of engine throttle and aileron for left and right side with the advantage of engine differential mode. The proposed MRAC is applied to large transport aircraft in the presence of actuator failure, and the performance is validated using MATLAB/Simulink environment. The tracking record of MRAC and linear quadratic regulator (LQR) shows the effectiveness of the incorporated control algorithm.