Active fault tolerant control of a completely damaged vertical tail aircraft with differential engine thrust and left-over surfaces

Modern aircraft require high degree of safety and stability for their faithful operation together with a fairly robust fault tolerant control for faults accommodation. In this paper the modeling, control and simulation perspectives have been studied for the extreme damage scenario of the completely lost vertical tail of a commercial transport aircraft during flight. The damage effects on the aerodynamic characteristics and changes in the mass properties for lateral and directional stability of the aircraft are studied and modelled appropriately. It is proposed that the aircraft can recover from this extreme damage scenario through the use of differential engine thrust and the leftover surfaces as control effectors. A Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) technique based Model Reference Adaptive System (MRAS) controller has been designed to regain the stability of the damaged aircraft and for command tracking performance. The simulation results show that the proposed adaptive control strategy works very well and imply for the failsafe operation in the emergency situation effectively.