Active fault-tolerant control strategy of large civil aircraft under elevator failures

Aircraft longitudinal control is the most important actuation system and its failures would lead to catastrophic accident of aircraft. This paper proposes an active fault-tolerant control (AFTC) strategy for civil aircraft with different numbers of faulty elevators. In order to improve the fault-tolerant flight control system performance and effective utilization of the control surface, trimmable horizontal stabilizer (THS) is considered to generate the extra pitch moment. A suitable switching mechanism with performance improvement coefficient is proposed to determine when it is worthwhile to utilize THS. Furthermore, AFTC strategy is detailed by using model following technique and the proposed THS switching mechanism. The basic fault-tolerant controller is designed to guarantee longitudinal control system stability and acceptable performance degradation under partial elevators failure. The proposed AFTC is applied to Boeing 747-200 numerical model and simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed AFTC approach.