A fault diagnosis based reconfigurable longitudinal control system for managing loss of air data sensors for a civil aircraft

An integrated fault diagnosis based fault tolerant longitudinal control system architecture is proposed for civil aircraft which can accommodate partial or total losses of angle of attack and/or calibrated airspeed sensors. A triplex sensor redundancy is assumed for the normal operation of the aircraft using a gain scheduled longitudinal normal control law. The fault isolation functionality is provided by a bank of 6 fault detection filters, which individually monitor each of the 6 sensors using robust low order LPV residual generators. In the case of losses of up to 5 sensors, a fault estimation technique based on LPV estimators can be employed to reconstruct the missing sensor information necessary for gain scheduling. In the worst case of a total failure of all 6 sensors, a robust constant longitudinal control law is employed which ensures a basic longitudinal control performance. The proposed control architecture fulfils the basic requirements formulated in the Benchmark Problem in the RECONFIGURE project