Reliable Fault Identification for Aircraft Control Surface Damage

Fault Detection and Diagnosis system (FDD) is used to isolate the aircraft fault which provides information to reconfiguration mechanism to recover its operation during the fault occurrence. Using FDD, only anticipated faults can be tackled by design. Inaccurate information from the FDD and if interpreted incorrectly by the reconfiguration mechanism, can lead to a complete loss of system stability. Robust fault identification methods need to be explored especially for the unanticipated fault scenarios. In this paper, single control surface damage fault scenario arising due to either bird strike or battle damage is considered. A typical mathematical model of the aircraft is simulated with single control surface damage which captures the dynamics of high performance aircraft. The real-time parameter estimation of augmented aircraft is essential for reconfigurable flight control. Fault detection and identification is solved with extended Kalman filter considering only state and observation equations for lateral and directional axis.