Distributed Control System for Aircraft Fuel Management – Part II

An innovative distributed control system for aircraft fuel management with avionics advantages has been developed and presented in lecture part I. The fuel system operation modes considered are pressure refueling, engine supply, and transfer. During the flight, the fuel is used to balance the aircraft. Therefore, it is usually moved from one tank to another tank, while assuring always the supply to the engines. During a normal flight, there are some events to which the system must respond activating and deactivating components (for example, opening or closing valves, and starting or stopping pumps). Thus, the smart valves or pumps must know when they must activate or deactivate themself without the need to receive orders from a central computer. The sequence of fuel control system events is not fixed because, for example, an engine can consume much more fuel than the other one (for some reason), and then the system must respond automatically to the unbalance through special transfers. Another example for using fuel transfers is when a component (valve or pump) fails, the system must also respond automatically to this abnormal behavior somehow. In such situations, the smart fuel components must know themselves how to deal with it. Lecture part II discusses experimental results from lab prototypes, aircraft rigs, and flight tests of the above distributed aircraft fuel management system.