Fault Tolerant Control for Commercial Aircraft with Actuator Faults and Amplitude Saturation

In this paper, a constrained control scheme based on model reference adaptive control is investigated for longitudinal motions of a commercial aircraft with actuator faults and amplitude saturation. As presented, an adaptive law based on Lyapunov function is utilized to adjust the fault tolerant control law. Both additive and multiplicative faults are considered in the designed controller to deal with locked in place, loss of effectiveness, and bias actuator faults. Moreover, the basic controller and the fault tolerant controller adopt different techniques to anti-windup respectively for their diverse construction. Proofs for the stability of the two modified controllers which improve the performance of control system operating in the presence of actuator faults and amplitude saturation are proposed. Finally, a numerical example of the anti-windup fault tolerant controller for a commercial aircraft is demonstrated. The stability and performance improvements can be accrued with the presented fault tolerant control scheme.