In this paper, for an axially moving system, with the purpose of suppressing vibration, an adaptive fault‐tolerant control method with time‐varying constraints is investigated. The dynamics of the system are comprised of an ordinary differential equation coupled with a partial differential equation. The method used in our study is known as fault‐tolerant control to process affairs of actuator failures occur. Actual control substitutes for ideal control to regulate the vibration when the actuator occurs undesired failures. Time‐varying constraints are appropriate to cope with the variation range of the performance. Lyapunov function has proven that the adaptive control law is feasible, as well as verifying the exponential stability of the system. Eventually, simulations we have done suggest that the effectiveness of the designed control is feasible.