Active Fault Tolerant Control Scheme for a General Aviation Aircraft Model

This paper addresses the development of a novel active fault tolerant control scheme. The methodology is based on a fault detection and diagnosis procedure relying on adaptive filters designed via the nonlinear geometric approach. The controller reconfiguration exploits a further control loop, depending on the on-line estimate of the fault signal. One of the advantages of this strategy is that, for example, a structure of logic–based switching controller is not required. The active fault tolerant control scheme is therefore applied to a PA–30 aircraft simulator in several flight conditions, in the presence of actuator faults, turbulence, measurement noise, and modelling errors. The achieved results in faulty conditions show the enhancement of the flying quality, the asymptotic fault accommodation, and the control objective recovery.