Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation June 20 - 23, Harbin, China

Multivariable Robust Control Design of a Turbofan Engine for Full Flight Envelope Operation
Haiquan Wang, Ling Ouyang, Dongyun Wang School of Electric and Information Engineering Zhongyuan University of Technology Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China whq036076260@mail.nwpu.edu.cn
Abstract In order to fulfill the full flight envelope aeroengine control, as one of the most effective solutions, gain scheduling control system was designed in this paper which could weaken the influence of the limited robust of traditional controller. Based on the previous works such as the engine modeling and the two degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) H loopshaping controller design, the full flight envelope was divided up into eight regions and the control system which was constituted by eight 2DOF controllers for each sub-regions was constructed in which the eight controllers of different sub-regions could be switched based on the engine altitude and Mach number. In order to decrease the disturbance in the process of switchover between the controllers of different sub-regions, as an innovation, the bumpless switch logic based on the technology called inertia delayed to soften the switch was adopted in the control system. For the purpose of checking the effect of full envelope control system, the hardware in-the-loop simulations have been done on the real-time simulation platform based on rapid prototype. The excellent performance of the full envelope robust control system for the turbofan engine was shown, as well as the validity of flight envelope dividing method and the bumpless switch logic was verified.
Index Terms Turbofan engine. Full flight envelope. Bumpless switch logic. Rapid prototype.

Lei Liu Department of Computer Science and Applications Zhengzhou Institute of Aeronautical Industry Management Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China dllzzhy@sina.com temperature and pressure, and the engine dynamics change in a significant nonlinear manner. On the other hand, as a linear control technique, the effect of H control designed for an operating point inevitably degrades in off-design operating point. Thus the tactic of flight envelope dividing up and divisional governing should be adopted for the better performance of full flight envelope engine control. The process could be concluded as follow: First of all, dividing up the flight envelope according to the engine inlet parameters and selecting nominal points. Then 2DOF H robust controller could be designed at the nominal points corresponding to each envelope sub-regions. Subsequently, the control system could be constructed by scheduling the resulted controllers based on the change of H and Ma. What should be noted is that in order to weaken the disturbances caused by the switchover among different controllers of different sub-regions, bumpless switch logics based on the technology called inertia delayed to soften the switch will be introduced in this paper creatively, which could be coded by automatic code generator and download to the simulation platform[3][4]. The whole simulation platform for evaluating purpose are developed based on rapid prototyping approach which could free the engineers from the tedious and errorprone task of writing code for a given control law. II. THE 2DOF H CONTROLLER DESIGN In order to improve the tracking performance and the robustness of aero-engine control system simultaneously which couldnt realize in traditional H control method, 2DOF H control design technique [6] is introduced and employed in H loop-shaping control [5] frame. The 2DOF H loop-shaping method could be illustrated as Fig.1, where the normalized left coprime factorization of the shaped plant is Gs = M 1 N , Kf as the feedback controller is adopted to guarantee the robustness of the system, Tr is the reference model that represents the desired closed-loop with ideal response characteristics, K p is the prefilter which ensures matching between the model Tr and the transfer function from x to y, and is used to adjust the matching requirement between Tr and the closed-loop system response.

NOMENCLATURE H Ma WFM A8 XNHC XNLC P36 PLA Altitude Mach number Fuel flow rate Nozzle area High pressure compressor speed Low pressure compressor speed Turbine pressure ratio Power lever angle I. INTRODUCTION With the increasing demand to enhance the reliability and durability of turbofan engine, the demand for multivariable robust control with excellent performance of robust stabilization, decoupling and reference tracking is becoming apparent [1]. As a deformation of H robust controller design method, 2DOF H loop-shaping design procedure whose feedback controller and pre-filter are designed respectively to improve tracking performance while maintaining robustness has been applied to aero-engine controller design successfully [2]. However, as the turbofan engine performs over the wide range envelope, it experiences large changes in the ambient

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Fig.1 Two degrees-of-freedom H loop-shaping design frame

0 0 0.5 1 Ma 1.5 2 2.5

After a series of derivation, the 2DOF H loop-shaping control design problem could be expressed as synthesizing the controller K = [ K p K f ] by the standard H algorithms based on the general plant P which could be realized by:
A 0 0 C C 0 C 0 Ar 0 0 2C r 0 0 0 Br 0 0 2 Dr I 0 ( BDT + ZC T ) R 1/ 2 0 0 R1/ 2 B 0 I D D 0 D

Fig.2 Divided full flight envelope

Obviously, the eight divided sub-regions could fully cover the whole flight envelope, and there are almost no gaps between any two of the sub-regions.
. FULL ENVELOPE CONTROL SYSTEM DESIGN

R1/ 2
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Where G = A B , T = Ar Br , R=I+DDT and Z is the r C D s C D r r solution to the following RICCATI equation:

(A BS1DTC)Z + Z(A BS1DTC)T ZCT R1CZ + BS1BT = 0

The details and the simulation results of 2DOF H loopshaping engine controller design could be seen in [2], the results show H loop-shaping method possesses more robustness than any other linear design method, IV. FULL FLIGHT ENVELOPE DIVIDING A. The engine system The system used to demonstrate the full envelope control system design technique is a twin spool, mixed ow, after burning military-type gas turbofan engine wherein the lowpressure rotor system is mechanically independent of the highpressure rotor system. The nonlinear engine model mentioned in this paper is a dynamic computer component level model capable of simulating the engine operating envelope based on C++ and the linear model at different operating point could be generated with the modelling method called fitting as shown in [7]. The modelling results are listed in [4]. B. Full envelope division As a typical linear multivariable design method, the results in [2] show that only a H controller for an operating point cant fulfil the full envelope flight control task, envelope dividing and controller scheduling scheme should be used. The procedure of envelope dividing adopted in this paper could be defined as roughly dividing and subdivision based on the engine inlet parameters as discussed in [4]. With this method the full envelope could be divided into eight subregions as shown in Fig.2 and the nominal points representing sub-regions are (1.85, 0.3), (2.5,1), (6, 1), (6.5, 1.5), (11, 1.5), (12.3, 2), (17.5, 1.6), (16, 2) respectively.

A. Control system structure Based on the linear models corresponding to the eight nominal points, 2DOF H loop-shaping controllers could be designed for eight sub-regions, and the controller-schedule control system for full flight envelope could be constructed with the change of engine altitude and Mach number: The whole control system is built up by the SISO control system for acceleration process, deceleration process as well as steady-state control and the MIMO control system designed for augmented transient condition. During the full flight envelope control operating process, for every control cycle of 25 milliseconds, the form of the controller should be ascertained firstly based on the current state of engine, then one of the eight controllers for different sub-regions could be selected and aroused based on the engine altitude and Mach number. Meanwhile, the other seven controllers are standing by and waiting for the switching signal thus the computational burden of the digital electronic engine control (DEEC) could be reduced effectively. The whole structure has been constructed in MATLAB/Simulink which could be automatic coded by RTW and downloaded to DEEC in the simulation platform mentioned in [3][4]. B. Bumpless switch logic Obviously, during the full envelope engine control, the controllers for different sub-regions always switch back and forth, and the perturbations of the control variables occur inevitably during the switchover between any two of the controllers. In order to achieve smooth transition during the switchover between any two of the controllers for different sub-regions, the inertia delayed to soften the switch technology has been introduced in this paper: Take SISO controller as example, suppose at a certain time t1, the change of the region where the engine locates has taken place, and the corresponding controller has been switched from A to B. Then the output U of the control system could be defined by (1) U = U b + e at (U a U b ) Where Ua represents the output of controller A at the switching time t1, it is unchanged during the controller Bs working process until the next switch, and Ub is the output of

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controller B in the current time t2. t is the total working hours of B, from the switch time t1 to the current time t2, which could be deduced from the duty cycles of the controller. t should be re-assigned to zero at the moment of next switch time, and re-start timing, As we can see from (1), at the controller switching time t1, t is equal to zero, and the output of the full envelope control system is equal to Ua which represents the output of controller A in the previous control cycle. With the increasing of the time t, the influence of Ua which has been switched off gradually weakens, meanwhile the controller output Ub gradually increases its influence. What should be noted is that the value of a was validated as 1 in this system through repeated debugging, which directly affects the fading out speed of Ua and the fading in speed of Ub, as well as affects the stability of the control system. With the help of the equation, its clear that the control variables disturbances occurred before and after switching could be restrained, and the smooth transition could be realized. In order to utilize the simulation platform based on rapid prototype, the switch logic should be rearranged and constructed in MATLAB/Simulink with the assistance of the Simulink blocks such as Embedded MATLAB function, Unit delay, Goto/From, and so on. The whole structure of one controller in the SISO control system with switch logic is shown in Fig.3. The controller output---Wfm could be calculated through the sum of the current controller output Ub represented by point 1 and the output of swich logic represented by point 2 in the structure. Obviously, from (1), the difficulty of the problem is the determination of the operating time t of the current controller especially in MATLAB/Simulink. A creative solution adopted in this paper is to number to each controller representing each eight sub-regions, thus every controller for each sub-region has a specifically ID signal. Through the controller ID signals comparison between the previous control cycle and current control cycle in the Embedded MATLAB Function, the result that if there has been any switchover before the current control cycle could be concluded, thus with the help of Simulink block Unit delay, the output Ua of the switch-off controller at switching time and the number of current controllers duty cycle can be decided, and the operating time t of the current controller could be calculated consequently.
. SIMULATION With considerations of real-time, safety and low costs in mind, the real-time simulation has been done based on the open and developable hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform [3] as shown in Fig.4. There are three parts in the simulation platform which are workstation, Simulated PC, and DEEC. The full envelope control system which has been designed in workstation and the turbofan engine component level model could be automatic coded with the help of RealTime Workshop and downloaded to DEEC and simulated PC respectively through the network.

Fig.3 Sturcture of the SISO controller with switch logic

Workstation(PC) MATLAB/Simulink/RTW/S-Function Tornado/Vxworks Explr/xPC Target

HUB TCP/IP Network

TCP/IP network

External hardware IRQ Simulated PC xPC Target PCL-812PG ISA bus A/D D/A
Circuits

DEEC(PC104) Vxworks PM511P PC104 Bus

Real-Time loop

Fig. 4 Architecture of the simulation platform

The simulation for steady-state control has been carried out firstly, where the PLA was kept at 600, H and MA were changed according to the timing as shown in Fig.5. The simulation results are shown in Fig.6. The results shown that the condition of the engine kept almost the same under the command from power lever, and the fluctuate of the control variable and the controlled variable whose maximum percentages reached to 0.25% and 3.9% respectively during the switch between different controllers was weakened with the help of switch logic. Then the transition state control simulation has been done while the PLA, H and Ma were changed as shown in Fig.7 and Fig.5 respectively, and the results are shown in Fig.8. Obviously, as the controlled variable, XNLC varied with the change of PLA, the variety of the ambient environment had almost none effect to the condition of aero-engine which was under control. Furthermore, the bump during controller switchover process has been reduced visibly, the values of XNLC and WFM account for 0.4 and 2.67 percent decrease. Finally, the augment transient simulation has been executed where the engine condition was changed according to the timing as shown in Fig.9. The switch procedure has been done when the engine was stable at the 1100 position, and the simulation results are shown in Fig.10. The good tracking performance has been obtained during the augment transient process no matter how the operating point change, and the bumps of the control variablesWFM, A8, as well as the

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controlled variables---XNLC and P36 have been eliminated. From the results, it is clear that no matter what condition the engine are, maybe the steady-state, transition state or augment transient process, the control system could fulfill the aeroengine flight envelope control, the bump during the sub-region controller switching process could be eliminated effectively.
. CONCLUSION

Several key technologies such as division of flight envelope and the bumpless switchover during multivariable robust control system design for turbofan engine full flight envelope operation have been discussed has been discussed. The results of the hardware-in-the-loop simulation indicate the designed full envelope control system is effective for the turbofan engine. REFERENCES
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[1] S. Adibhatla, Propulsion control law design for the NASA STOVL controls technology program, AIAA93-4842, CA, Dec. 13, 1993. [2] Haiquan Wang, Yingqing Guo, Research of aero-engine two degrees-offreedom robust controller based on LMI approach, Journal of Aerospace Power,pp.1413-1419, Vol.24, 2009 [3]Jun Lu, Yingqing Guo, Research on automatic code generation technology for control method based on RTWEC, Journal of Aerospace Power, Vol.6 2008. [4] Haiquan Wang, H Robust Controller Design for Aero-engine and Simulation, Ph.D.dissertation, Northwestern polytechnical university, 2009 [5] Haiquan Wang, Yingqing Guo, et al, Aero-engine Robust H loopshaping Controller Design Based on Genetic Algorithm, IEEE 2nd IITA, Shanghai, pp.1035-1039, 2008. [6] Limebeer D., Kasenally E., and Perkins J., On the design of robust two degree of freedom controllers, Automatica, 1993, 29(I), pp. 157-168. [7] Zhengping Feng, Jianguo Sun, A new method for establishing a state variable model of aeroengine, Journal of Aerospace Power, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 435-438, 1998.

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Fig.6(a) XNLC with (dashed) and without (solid) switch logic

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Fig.8(a) XNLC with (dashed) and without (solid) switch logic

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