Fault Diagnosis and Control Reconfiguration in Earth Satellite Model Engines

This paper presents the design strategies used to develop a supervision scheme for the attitude control system of an earth satellite model. The main point regards the handling of faults affecting the satellite engines, i.e. how to detect and isolate faults, and how to prevent propagation into failures with potential mission loss as a consequence. Thus, this work develops a comprehensive scheme for fault detection, isolation and recovery of the engines for a spacecraft attitude control, based on the earth satellite model. As the present study focuses on an earth satellite model, robustness is achieved by exploiting almost known disturbance models and an explicit disturbance de–coupling method. The achieved results demonstrate how the proposed methodology can constitute a successful approach for real application in future spacecraft.