Early detection of aircraft control surface faults by dedicated Kalman filtering: runaways and jammings
Résumé
Early and robust detection of runaway (hard over) and jamming (locked in place) of aircraft control surfaces is an important issue in the process of overall aircraft structural design optimization. Today, system design objectives originating from structural load constraints are more and more stringent for satisfying the newer societal imperatives towards future "sustainable" aircraft (quieter, cleaner, smarter and more affordable). In this paper, a simple model-based solution is proposed to address this problem. The proposed strategy provides good performance and robustness and requires technical low computational effort for implementation. The proposed approach does not substitute for already in place physical redundancy-based monitoring system, but it can be seen as a useful supplement that properly exploits the physical redundancy. So, from a practical point of view, a big advantage of the proposed scheme is that it can be embedded within the structure of in-service monitoring system as a part of the Flight Control Computer (FCC) software. The methodology is based on a dedicated Kalman filtering. Simulation results using in-flight recorded data sets provided by Airbus and a highly representative aircraft benchmark are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the developed technique.