Design of Fault Tolerant Control Systems: a Flight Simulator Experiment

This paper discusses a method for developing fault tolerant flight control systems. The ultimate goal is to increase aircraft safety and autonomy. The research work draws expertise from actions undertaken within European Flight Mechanics Action Group (FM-AG(16)) on Fault Tolerant Control (FTC), which develops a collaborative effort in Europe to create new FTC technologies that significantly advance the goals of the aviation safety. The methodology is developed within the H∞ setting and is applied to a Trimmable Horizontal Stabilizer (THS) runaway fault. Fault compensability properties are discussed and in order to show the efficiency of the proposed method, a flight test campaign which was carried out within the FM-AG(16) project is presented. A key feature of the proposed strategy is that the design of the fault tolerant control loop is done without removing the validated and certified nominal flight control system (FCS).