Sensor Fault Tolerant Control for Aircraft Engines Using Sliding Mode Observer

This paper investigated the problem of fault estimation and fault-tolerant control (FTC) against sensor faults for aircraft engines. By applying a second order sliding mode observer (SOSMO) to the engine on-board model, estimations of the system states and sensor faults could be obtained simultaneously, and the result of state estimation was unaffected when using the reduced-order sliding mode system. This result gave rise to the idea to use the estimated states instead of physical sensor signal in the engine close-loop feedback control. Unlike those using passive FTC concepts, the tradeoff between control performance and robustness was inherently unnecessary. Meanwhile, compared to active FTC approaches, because any classical state/output feedback method can be directly applied to the proposed scheme without any controller reconfiguration, extra undesired dynamic responses caused by parameter reconfiguring were avoided. In this paper, the proposed FTC scheme was tested on the nonlinear model of a civil aircraft turbofan engine, and numerical simulation results showed satisfactory sensor FTC performance.