H∞/H-LPV solutions for fault detection of aircraft actuator faults: Bridging the gap between theory and practice

The work presented in this paper is undertaken within the European FP7 funded Advanced Fault Diagnosis for Sustainable Flight Guidance and Control (ADDSAFE) project. The goal is to propose new fault detection and fault diagnosis techniques that could significantly help developing environmentally-friendlier aircraft. In this paper, LPV model-based fault detection schemes are proposed and compared for robust and early detection of faults in aircraft control surfaces servo-loop. The proposed methodologies are based on a slight modification of the H/H_ LPV optimization techniques proposed in [1] and [2] for systems modelled in, first polytopic manner, second linear fractional representation fashion. Both the methods aim at designing fault detection filters with enhanced fault transmission H- gain and large h nuisance attenuation. A complete Monte Carlo campaign from a high representative simulator, provided by Airbus as a part of the ADDSAFE project, demonstrates the potential of the proposed techniques. It is shown that both the proposed fault detection schemes can be embedded within the structure of in-service monitoring systems as a part of the Flight Control Computer software. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.