Application of an integral sliding mode FTC for a large transport aircraft

In this paper, integral sliding mode control ideas are incorporated with control allocation, to design fault tolerant controllers for longitudinal and lateral control of a large transport aircraft. The proposed scheme has the capability to retain nominal performance even in the face of total failure of certain actuators, provided there is enough redundancy in the system. During faults or failures, the control signals are redistributed by the control allocation unit to the healthy actuators based on their effectiveness level, without reconfiguring the controller. A stability analysis is carried out to ensure the closed-loop stability of the system in the presence of faults and certain actuator failures. Simulations using the FTLAB747 software, show the effectiveness and validity of the proposed scheme.