Evaluation of a second generation reconfiguration strategy for aircraft flight control systems subjected to actuator failure/surface damage

The authors report evaluation results obtained on the six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear simulation of the Grumman Combat Reconfigurable Control Aircraft (CRCA). The reconfiguration strategy consists of a robust flight control system tolerant of low-level surface damage, a hierarchical failure detection, isolation, and estimation (FDIE) system identifying actuator failures and moderate-to-serve surface damage, and a reconfiguration logic in which the pseudo surface resolver (PSR) is reconfigured after impairment to recover performance and minimize transients. Preliminary performance results are presented