Sliding Mode Propulsion Control Tests on a Motion Flight Simulator

This paper describes a fault-tolerant sliding-mode control allocation scheme capable of coping with the loss of all control surfaces resulting from a failure of the hydraulics system, during which time the scheme only uses the engines to control the aircraft. The paper presents tests of the scheme implemented on a six-degree-of-freedom motion research flight simulator at Delft University of Technology, using a realistic maneuver involving an emergency return to a near-landing condition on a runway in response to the failure. The simulator results show that not only does the controller provide high tracking performance during nominal fault-free conditions, this performance is also maintained after the total loss of all control surfaces. This shows the capability of the proposed sliding-mode control allocation scheme to achieve and maintain desired performance levels using only propulsion by redistributing the control signals to the engines when failures occur