Aircraft Wing Ice Online Detection and Fault-Tolerant Control Law Design

This paper focuses on the aircraft inflight icing detection and protection problem. A fault-tolerant flight control with the time-varying aerodynamic parameter online estimation is prweoposed to stabilize the aircraft attitude and maintain the flight height during the wing ice accretion process. The eigenstructure assignment and the proportional-integral- derivative control methods are utilized to design the flight control law. An aerodynamic parameter estimation method is adopted for the online ice detection and the control law reconfiguration. Then the accuracy of the parameter estimator and the performance of the closed control loop are evaluated by a steady-level cruise scenario of an ice research aircraft. The results indicate the feasibility of realizing the ice detection and control protection simultaneously in the fault-tolerant flight control loop.