Multiple fault-based FDI and reconfiguration for aircraft engine sensors

Purpose: Condition monitoring and health management of an aircraft engine is of importance due to engine's critical position in aircraft. Missions require uninterrupted and safer conditions during the flight or taxi operations. Hence, the deviations, abnormal situations or failures have to be under control. This paper aims to propose a cascade connected approach for an aircraft engine fault tolerant control. Design/methodology/approach: The cascade connected structure includes a full-order unknown input observer for fault detection and eliminating the unknown disturbance effect on system, a generalized observer scheme for fault isolation and a Boolean logic mechanism for decision-making in reconfiguration process, respectively. This combination is simulated on a linear turbojet engine model in case of unknown input disturbance and under various sensor failure scenarios. Findings: The simulation results show that the suggested fault detection isolation reconfiguration (FDIR) approach works effectively for multiple sensor failures with various amplitudes. Originality/value: Different from other studies, the proposed model is sensitive to unknown input disturbance and failures that have unknown amplitudes. One another notable feature of suggested FDIR approach is adaptability of structure against multiple sensor failures. Here, it is assumed that only a single fault is to be detected and isolated at a time. The simulation results show that the proposed structure can be suggested for linear models especially for physical redundancy-based real-time applications easily, quickly and effectively.