Design of an Actuator Fault Tolerant Flight Control System Using Fault Detection and Diagnosis

This paper presents a fault tolerant flight control design for the longitudinal linear model of the Boeing 737-100. The EMMAE (Extended Multiple Model Adaptive estimation) method is used to design the FDD process (Fault Detection and Diagnosis). Based essentially on a set of EKFs (Extended Kalman Filters), this method makes it possible to simulate several types of faults including stuck and oscillation. To develop the RFC (Reconfigurable Flight Control) law, SMC (Sliding Mode Control) method [11] is used. To rigorously investigate the performance of the overall system with respect of interactions between the two subsystems, The MRAC (Model Reference Adaptive Control) method [3] is used for comparison. Several simulation results using Matlab and Simulink show the desired system performance with fault compensation.