Detectability analysis of faults affecting actuators and sensors of flexible space structures

The design of reliable and fault tolerant space flexible structures is a key point to guarantee successful space missions. This paper presents a study of detectability of faults affecting sensors and actuators of a continuous flexible structure subject to unknown disturbances. Several sensors and actuators configurations, also including the so called co-located setup, are investigated. The structural properties of these class of systems is studied by means of the geometric approach-based system theory which provides, in a coordinate-free framework, necessary and sufficient conditions for the resolvability of the fault detection problem