Robust fault-tolerant control for wing flutter under actuator failure

Many control laws, such as optimal controller and classical controller, have seen their applications to suppressing the aeroelastic vibrations of the aeroelastic system. However, those control laws may not work effectively if the aeroelastic system involves actuator faults. In the current study for wing flutter of reentry vehicle, the effect of actuator faults on wing flutter system is rarely considered and few of the fault-tolerant control problems are taken into account. In this paper, we use the radial basis function neural network and the finite-time H-infinity adaptive fault-tolerant control technique to deal with the flutter problem of wings, which is affected by actuator faults, actuator saturation, parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The theory of this article includes the modeling of wing flutter and fault-tolerant controller design. The stability of the finite-time adaptive fault-tolerant controller is theoretically proved. Simulation results indicate that the designed fault-tolerant flutter controller can effectively deal with the faults in the flutter system and can promptly suppress the wing flutter as well. (C) 2016 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.