Fault-tolerant control method for actuator and component faults

In this paper, a fault-tolerant control method is developed. This method makes possible the compensation of additive or multiplicative actuator and component faults. Its principle is based on the online estimation of a quantity which is equal to zero in the fault-free case and equal to the fault magnitude when a fault occurs on the system. Then, a new control law is added to the nominal one in order to compensate the fault effect on the system. The main advantage of this approach is that it is very easy to implement and it does not require a fault diagnosis module which reduce the computation time and avoid the problems caused by false alarms and delays in the fault detection and isolation. The performances of this method are tested in simulation on a pilot plant