Modular flight control reconfiguration design and simulation

This paper describes a reconfiguring flight control algorithm for damaged aircraft based upon a modular approach. This approach combines real time physical model identification with adaptive nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI). The sensitivity of NDI to modeling errors is eliminated here by making use of a real time identified model of the aircraft. In failure situations, the damaged aircraft model is identified by the two step method and this updated model is supplied to the model-based adaptive NDI routine, which reconfigures for the fault in real time. Reconfiguration test results for damaged aircraft models indicate good fault handling capabilities of this fault tolerant control set-up, for component as well as structural faults.

Research highlights► Adaptive control techniques are capable to recover damaged aircraft. ► The two step method identifies damaged aircraft in real time. ► The manual controller improves handling qualities and pilot workload. ► The automatic controller shows good performance. ► Practical tests with real aircraft and test pilots are recommended.