Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Flight Control System

Design Against Partial Actuator Failures

Xiang Yu, Member, IEEE, and Jin Jiang, Senior Member, IEEE

SWOT Analysis by Alexander Kim R. Waing

Abstract
A model to represent loss of control effectiveness in an aircraft is developed by
analyzing physical faults in the hydraulically-driven control surfaces. A hybrid fault-tolerant
control system (FTCS) that combines the merits of passive and active FTCSs is proposed to
accommodate this kind of partial actuator failures. The hybrid FTCS is able to first slow down
the rate of fault induced system deterioration with minimal fault information so that the fault
detection and diagnosis (FDD) schemes can have additional time to achieve more accurate
fault diagnosis. Once the correct fault information is obtained, the hybrid FTCS can
counteract the faults effectively through an optimal reconfigurable controller. Depending on
the availability of actuator redundancies, the passive FTCS and the reconfigurable controller
are designed in the framework of linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach. Case studies of an
aircraft subject to different degree of loss of control effectiveness have been carried out to
prove the effectiveness of this new approach to FTCS.

- The above figure is the schematic diagram of a hydraulic driven control surface.
- The torque motor converts the correspondingly voltage
from the controller into the angular displacement on the baffle, which generates a
differential pressure in the servo-valve. Subsequently, the servo-valve regulates the
motion of the actuator by directing the fluid flow to and from the actuator chamber.
 - When the valve spool is pushed or pulled by the torque motor that is driven by the
control signal, the amount of fluid delivered to the actuator chamber will change.
The fluid will then move the piston in the actuator chamber. Since the control
surface is physically connected to the piston through the piston rod, the
displacement of the piston leads to movement in the control surface. The torque
generated by the force through a hinge to deflect the control surface also has to
overcome the aerodynamic force during a flight.
- A common failure in a hydraulic powered actuator is loss of pressure in the supply
pump due to leaks. Reduction in pressure could cause stalling of the actuator when it
can no longer balance the aerodynamic load imposed from the control surface during
a flight. In an aircraft whose control surfaces are manipulated through hydraulic
actuators, stalling of an actuator may have disastrous consequences, because control
actions would not get executed as expected. In this paper, an incorrect supply
pressure is considered as the fault condition to illustrate the hybrid FTCS design
concept and process.

OBJECTIVES AND FORMULATION OF HYBRID FAULT TOLERANT CONTROL SYSTEMS

The objective of the hybrid FTCS in this paper can be stated as follows.
1) When a fault is detected, but not yet completely diagnosed, the performance
deterioration of the closed-loop system should be slowed down through a passive
control system.
2) After the fault diagnosis is completed, the optimal performance can then be
achieved through an appropriate reconfigurable controller.

Conclusion
A model of an aircraft with loss of control effectiveness is developed based on
analysis of physical faults in the hydraulic driven control surfaces. A hybrid FTCS
combining a passive and an active FTCS approaches is proposed to counteract
partial actuator faults. The unique feature of the proposed system is that, in the
presence of actuator faults, the passive FTCS can be used first to stabilize the system
with minimal fault information. Once the more detailed fault diagnostic information
becomes available, a reconfigurable controller can then be synthesized and used to
improve the performance. The effectiveness of the proposed FTCS scheme and the
design procedure are validated by using both linear and nonlinear case studies.