Benchmark Flight Scenarios for Testing Fault Tolerant Control of High Performance Aircraft

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Abstract

The Innovative Effector Concept (ICE) aircraft model is a high performance aircraft. The aircraft is over-actuated and a new control allocation algorithm has been designed previously to control this aircraft effectively: Incremental Nonlinear Control Allocation (INCA). It is unknown to what degree effector failures will affect the aircraft performance using this control algorithm. Hence, the main aim of this research is to investigate the performance of the over-actuated ICE aircraft model in presence of effector failures. New benchmark flight trajectories were defined for high performance aircraft performance testing. Autopilots were designed and tuned to automatically test all failure cases and manoeuvres. Tests of single effector failures for each flight condition and failure condition show the degradation in performance of the aircraft. Furthermore a sensitivity analysis was conducted to test the influence of aircraft state and starting conditions on the outcome of the performance for the most critical flight manoeuvre.