Fault-tolerant FADS system development for a hypersonic vehicle via neural network algorithms

Hypersonic vehicles suffer from extreme aerodynamic heating during flights, especially around the area of leading edge due to its small curvature. Therefore, flush air data sensing(FADS) system has been developed to perform accurate measurement of the air data parameters. In the present study, the method to develop the FADS algorithms with fail-operational capability for a sharp-nosed hypersonic vehicle is provided. To be specific, the FADS system implemented with 16 airframe-integrated pressure ports is used as a case study. Numerical simulations of different freestream conditions have been conducted to generate the database for the FADS targeting in 2 ≤ Ma ≤ 5 and 0 km ≤ H ≤ 30 km. Four groups of neural network algorithms have been developed based on four different pressure port configurations, and the accuracy has been validated by 280 groups of simulations. Particularly, the algorithms based on the 16-port configuration show an excellent ability to serve as the main solver of the FADS, where 99. 5% of the angle-of-attack estimations are within the error band ±0. 2°. The accuracy of the algorithms is discussed in terms of port configuration. Furthermore, diagnosis of the system health is present in the paper. A fault-tolerant FADS system architecture has been designed, which is capable of continuously sensing the air data in the case that multi-port failure occurs, with a reduction in the system accuracy.

Design and Reliability Analysis of DP-3 Dynamic Positioning Control Architecture

As the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas proliferate throughout deepwater area, the requirements on the reliability of dynamic positioning system become increasingly stringent. The control objective ensuring safety operation at deep water will not be met by a single controller for dynamic positioning. In order to increase the availability and reliability of dynamic positioning control system, the triple redundancy hardware and software control architectures were designed and developed according to the safe specifications of DP-3 classification notation for dynamically positioned ships and rigs. The hardware redundant configuration takes the form of triple-redundant hot standby configuration including three identical operator stations and three real-time control computers which connect each other through dual networks. The function of motion control and redundancy management of control computers were implemented by software on the real-time operating system VxWorks. The software realization of task loose synchronization, majority voting and fault detection were presented in details. A hierarchical software architecture was planed during the development of software, consisting of application layer, real-time layer and physical layer. The behavior of the DP-3 dynamic positioning control system was modeled by a Markov model to analyze its reliability. The effects of variation in parameters on the reliability measures were investigated. The time domain dynamic simulation was carried out on a deepwater drilling rig to prove the feasibility of the proposed control architecture

Application of Analytic Redundancy-based Fault Diagnosis of Sensors to Onboard Maintenance System

Analytic redundancy-based fault diagnosis technique （ARFDT） is applied to onboard maintenance system （OMS）. The principle of the proposed ARFDT scheme is to design a redundancy configuration using ARFDT to enhance the functions of redundancy management and built in test equipment （BITE） monitor. Redundancy configuration for dual-redundancy and analytic redundancy is proposed, in which, the fault diagnosis includes detection and isolation. In order to keep the balance between rapid diagnosis and binary hypothesis, a filter together with an elapsed time limit is designed for sequential probability ratio test （SPRT） in the process of isolation. Diagnosis results would be submitted to central maintenance computer （CMC） together with BITE information. Moreover, by adopting reconstruction, the designed method not only provides analytic redundancy to help redundancy management, but also compensates the output when both of the sensors of the same type are faulty. Our scheme is applied to an aircraft’s sensors in a simulation experiment, and the results show that the proposed filter SPRT （FSPRT） saves at least 50% of isolation time than Wald SPRT （WSPRT）. Also, effectiveness, practicability and rapidity of the proposed scheme can be successfully achieved in OMS.