Analysis of Distributed Control of Turbine Engines

Scientific Monitoring, Inc. (SMI), Stanford University (SU) and Pratt and Whitney (PW) propose to conduct research to develop, implement, apply and realistically demonstrate new methods to analyze and predict the stability and performance of a distributed gas turbine engine control (DEC). The approach will be to develop the requirements for a DEC network. Then these requirements will be used to build a prototype architecture with realistic network hardware as an evaluation platform for the project. This platform will enable the team to efficiently evaluate important aspects of the distributed control including performance, stability, communication delay, packet sizing, information structures between nodes and overall node count to achieve the desired function. The team also will develop software tools based on the quadratic invariance and successive convex relaxation tools demonstrated in Phase I of this research. These tools will be applied to a realistic model of an engine over a significant operating range to demonstrate the utility of the design approach. Finally, the resultant design will be implemented in the prototype network evaluation platform to demonstrate operation of the distributed engine control. BENEFIT: Results from the project will be applicable to both future propulsion systems in the VAATE perspective as well as legacy and helicopter engines and will enable designers to efficiently evaluate design options for distributed engine control. Anticipated benefits include the ability to achieve specified performance for a distributed engine control design and to analyze competing designs to trade off performance, stability, communication bandwidth and system complexity.