ABSTRACT

Aircraft crash investigation agencies point out that one of the major factors for the aircraft accidents is the failure or damage of components such as actuators, sensors and other structural parts of aircraft. The Fault Detection Identification and Accommodation is important for the successful completion of a given flight mission. In general, a fault-tolerant flight control system needs to perform: Sensor Fault Detection, Identification and Accommodation or Reconfiguration and Actuator Fault Detection, Identification and Accommodation or Reconfiguration. Detection and reconfiguration of surface fault in an elevator of an aircraft is demonstrated using non-model-based fuzzy logic in terms of determining the factor of effectiveness of control surface and in turn, new control gain for reconfiguration. Once the fault is detected in a particular channel, Kalman filter is reconfigured by ignoring the feedback from the faulty sensor and using measurements from healthy sensors only.