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An analytical redundancy scheme for flight control systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

D. McLean  and
K. Alkhatib
D. McLean
Affiliation:
Southampton University (Formerly Department of Transport Technology, University of Technology, Loughborough)
K. Alkhatib
Affiliation:
Department of Aeronautics, Assad Engineering Academy, Aleppo, Syria
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Summary

The normal practice for achieving some specified degree of reliability in automatic flight control systems has been to use methods which employ several identical feedback channels. The use of such methods requires additional sensors and other hardware components. Since such an approach has become increasingly expensive to implement, and attracts operational costs, owing to the increased weight arising from the extra equipment, any method is attractive which achieves the same degree of reliability through the use of only a single hardware path for each feedback channel. This implies the employment of special software techniques for both detecting any channel failures and reconstructing the feedback signals, which are then missing as a result of those failures. Such a scheme is presented and discussed in the paper and a number of results obtained from digital simulation are also presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the scheme for a wide variety of sensor failure conditions. The sensitivity of the scheme to initial errors in the estimation process, to the dynamic nature of the motion sensors, and to errors in the mathematical model of the aircraft dynamics, is also illustrated and discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Aeronautical Journal , Volume 89 , Issue 889 , November 1985 , pp. 353 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1985 

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