Fault adaptation by reconfiguring flight controls using control allocation

This research work focuses on the design and implementation of control law and control allocation for overactuated, nonlinear model of commercial aircraft (B747-200). The redundancies in this aircraft are exploited to achieve fault tolerance in the system through control allocation. Control allocation in the aircraft is actually the distribution of the settings for various control surfaces to achieve virtual control demands (i.e. pitch, roll and yaw angular accelerations). Control allocation is studied as a convex optimization problem. A constrained strictly convex quadratic problem is used with variation of designed problem parameters to influence the solution explicitly and implicitly. The solution is obtained online at a sampling frequency of 100Hz and then applied to the control surfaces of the aircraft.