Reconfigurable flight control of a high incidence research model using predictive control

This paper describes a scheme for fault-tolerant control of an aircraft with a high angle of incidence. The scheme is an example of a generic scheme proposed by Maciejowski (1997), adapted to the particular needs of this application. It combines the use of a high-fidelity model of the aircraft with model predictive control, and assumes the availability of information about the fault which has occurred from an FDI system. This paper examines the performance of the proposed fault-tolerant scheme in the presence of severe failures of control surfaces and of the aircraft structure. It contains details of a modelling methodology which enables updating of the model with failure information, and of a methodology for online re-linearisation. The modelling methodology follows that introduced by Huzmezan and Maciejowski (1998)