Active fault tolerant control scheme for aircraft with dissimilar redundant actuation system subject to hydraulic failure

In this paper, an active fault tolerant control (AFTC) scheme is proposed for more electric aircraft (MEA) equipped with dissimilar redundant actuation system (DRAS). The effect of various fault/failure of hydraulic actuator (HA) on the system performance is analyzed in this work. In nominal condition, the state feedback control law is designed for primary control surfaces. In the presence of fault/failure of certain HA, control allocation (CA) scheme together with integral sliding mode controller (ISMC) is retrofitted with existing control law and engaged the secondary (redundant) actuators into the loop. A modified recursive least square (RLS) algorithm is proposed to identify the parametric faults in HA and to measure the effectiveness level of the actuator. In an event of failure of all HA's in the system, electro hydraulic actuators (EHA) are taken in loop to bring the system back to its nominal operation. In order to stabilize the closed-loop dynamics of HA and EHA, fractional order controllers are designed separately for each actuator. Simulations on the lateral directional model of aircraft demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme as compared to the existing methods in the literature.