Intermittent failure detection of multiple electrical connectors in EWIS

Electrical wiring interconnection system (EWIS) of civil aircraft has been paid more attention in recent years, and intermittent failure detection of electrical connectors in EWIS is a challenging problem. This paper presents a sliding mode observer (SMO) approach for the intermittent failure detection of an aircraft electrical system with multiple connector failures. The mathematical model of the aircraft electrical system which contains multiple connector failures is established for transforming the intermittent failure detection problem into observer-based multiplicative faults isolation and estimation problems. A set of adaptive sliding mode observers are designed to locate the failure connectors preliminarily, the observers can adapt the unknown upper bound of the faults. Furthermore, a fault-reconstruction scheme applying the equivalent output error injection principle is proposed for fault estimation, where the characteristic parameters of connecters are reconstructed to identify the failures. Finally, a numerical example is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.