Detection, Identification and Estimation of Surface Damage/Actuator Failure for High Performance Aircraft

This paper describes a hierarchical failure detection, identification and estimation (FDIE) algorithm for use in a self-repairing flight control system in a high performance aircraft. The developed hierarchical FDIE system consists of two subsystems: Actuator Failure Detection (APD) system which detects stuck, runaway, and floating actuator failures based on local information; and, Surface Damage Detection and Isolation (SDDI) system which detects partial surface loss failures and provides an estimate for the surface control effectiveness parameters after the impairment based on global information. The paper presents preliminary FDIE results obtained on the six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear simulation of a Combat Reconfigurable Control Aircraft (CRCA) under typical flight conditions, pilot inputs, and gust levels.