Fault detection and isolation for on-board sensors of a general aviation aircraft

The paper addresses the problem of the detection and isolation of the input and output sensor faults on a general aviation aircraft. It is characterised by a nonlinear model, in the presence of wind gusts, atmospheric turbulence and measurement errors. In particular, this work proposes a polynomial approach for the design of residual generators in order to realise complete diagnosis schemes when additive faults are present. In fact, the use of an input--output description for the linearised model of the aircraft allows to compute in a straightforward way the residual generators. This approach leads to dynamic filters that can achieve both good disturbance signal de--coupling and robustness properties with respect to both linearisation error and measurement noise. Mathematical descriptions of the aircraft measurement sensors are also taken into account. The results obtained in the simulation of the faulty behaviour of a PIPER PA30 aircraft and a comparison with other FDI approaches (both linear and nonlinear) are finally reported.