Quantitative Fault Tolerant Control Design for a Leaking Hydraulic Actuator

This paper documents the design of a low-order, fixed-gain, controller that can maintain the positioning performance of an electrohydraulic actuator operating under variable load with a leaking piston seal. A set of linear time-invariant equivalent models of the faulty hydraulic actuator is first established, in the frequency domain, by Fourier transformation of acceptable actuator input-output responses. Then, a robust position control law is synthesized by quantitative feedback theory to meet the prescribed design tolerances on closed-loop stability and reference tracking. The designed fault tolerant controller uses only actuator position as feedback, yet it can accommodate nonlinearities in the hydraulic functions, maintain robustness against typical parametric uncertainties, and maintain the closed-loop performance despite a leakage fault that can bypass up to 40% of the rated servovalve flow across the actuator piston. To demonstrate the utility of the fault tolerant control approach in a realistic application, the experimental fault tolerant hydraulic system is operated as a flight surface actuator in the hardware-in-the-loop simulation of a high-performance jet aircraft.