Fault detection and control reconfiguration in flight control

The use of reconfigurable control to retain a sufficient level of flying quality to enable a damaged combat aircraft to be flown to safety is being widely studied. Such flight control systems depend upon the feedback signals being available for measurement, and it is necessary, therefore, in such systems to use an analytical redundancy technique to deal with fault detection and isolation and to ensure that some signal is always available for sensing. This paper deals with two methods of reconfiguration and discusses an analytical redundancy scheme which can accommodate hard or soft sensor or controller failures. The effectiveness of the methods is illustrated by some results obtained from appropriate digital simulations