Ongoing Work on Fault Detection and Isolation for Flight Control Applications

Modern aircraft flight control relies on a complex network of interacting systems. These systems are safety critical systems, since a failure could have catastrophic consequences. It is therefore necessary to detect and isolate faults in aircraft control system components such as actuators or sensors before the fault is allowed to cause a system failure. Such detection and isolation could potentially enable timely system reconfiguration and increase safety of flight operations. Numerous fault detection and isolation techniques have been presented in the literature. This paper demonstrates the ability of one such technique, observer-based eigenstructure assignment, to detect and isolate faults by following implementation procedures and verifying its effectiveness through simulation. The scope of this paper is limited to actuator faults and to the simple case where all eigenvectors are assignable. Future work will include a similar assessment of the technique’s suitability for fault detection and isolation in sensors and in the case where not all eigenvectors are assignable. The goal of this work is to build a catalog of fault detection and isolation techniques and to devise an experiment in order to assess each technique’s relative advantages for flight control applications.