Integrated fault estimation and fault-tolerant control for a flexible regional aircraft

The article focuses on the design and application of an active reconfigurable controller that mitigates the effects of gust load and actuator faults on a flexible aircraft. A novel integrated adaptive output feedback scheme is investigated to address the actuator faults. The real-time fault values provided by the fault estimation module are considered in the reconfigurable control law to improve the fault-tolerant capability. The estimate values of faults and control gains are calculated by analyzing the stability of the overall system. The proposed controller is simulated using a flexible aircraft model with a discrete '1-cosine' gust, and the results show that it can effectively mitigate the wing root moments and recover the flight maneuver stability after the aircraft suffered from gusts.(c) 2021 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).