A Novel Engine Fault-Tolerant Control Method Based on Input Scheduling for Tiltrotor Aircraft

To enhance the precision of parameters estimation in conventional sensor fault-tolerant control methods with gas turbine speed scheduling, thereby ensuring the safe and reliable operation of tiltrotor/engine system, a novel engine fault-tolerant control method based on fuel flow scheduling is proposed. An onboard adaptive modeling method of turboshaft engine based on fuel scheduling is proposed. It conquers the defect of insufficient tracking precision of the modeling method with gas turbine speed as scheduling variable in case of engine components degradations. The sensor fault-tolerance control method of the turboshaft engine for tiltrotor aircraft is designed based on the sensor fault diagnosis and signal reconstruction, utilizing onboard adaptive model and Kalman filter. The simulation results demonstrate that compared with the conventional onboard adaptive modeling method with gas turbine speed scheduling, the proposed method has higher parameters estimation precision even if turboshaft engine degrades significantly. The fault-tolerant control method based on the proposed onboard adaptive model can quicken the response of engine output power in case of unexpected sensor failure. It guarantees the flight control quality of tiltrotor aircraft and enhances the reliability of integrated tiltrotor/engine system. The semi-physical experiments will be conducted in the future to validate the feasibility of the proposed sensor fault-tolerant control method.