Distributed Control-Based Fault-tolerant Control Method for AAV's DEP System

Distributed electric propulsion (DEP) has been proven to be the next-generation propulsion technology for full-electric aircraft and all-electric aircraft. To take advantage of the redundancy of the DEP system, the distributed control method and its related performance have been extensively studied. However, due to the characteristics of the distributed structure, faults of a single agent could propagate through the communication links, making the whole system fail. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant control method to stabilize the DEP system when an inverter single-phase open-circuit fault occurs. The proposed method adopts a distributed structure and could effectively depress the fluctuation of the rotation speed of each thruster without additional requirements for the increase in hardware amount and computational performance. Controller-hardware-in-the-loop (C-HIL) experiments have been conducted, and the corresponding results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.