Fault detection and isolation of aircraft air data/inertial system

Abstract

A method for failure detection and isolation (FDI) for redundant aircraft sensors is presented. The outputs of the concerned sensors are involved in the computation of flight control laws, and the objective is to eliminate any fault before propagation in the control loop when selecting a unique flight parameter among a set (generally, three) of redundant measurements. The particular case of an oscillatory failure is investigated. The proposed method allows an accurate FDI of erroneous sensor and computes a consolidated parameter based on the fusion of data from remaining valid sensors. The benefits of the presented method are to enhance the data fusion process with FDI techniques which improve the performance of the fusion when only few sources (less than three) are initially valid.