Computational Methods for Feedback Controllers for Aerodynamics Flow Applications

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research Phase I project proposes a product development effort aimed at establishing systematic procedures for control-oriented model reduction from PDE descriptions of aerodynamic flow systems, the design oflow-order feedback controllers using these procedures, and the implementation of these procedures in an industrial software environment compatible with existing control design tools. The basic work has already been established by research at theUniversity of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB). Most flow control problems can be recast as suppression of some instability (upstream) that causes some undesirable phenomenon (flow or pressure oscillations) downstream. The innovative feature of theproposed methods is that they capture the essential dynamics, i.e., they are control-oriented. In Phase I, the developed techniques will be applied to a flow control problem representative of aerospace problems for which most commercial finite elementpackages can handle. In Phase II, technology developed at UCSB and SC Solutions will be made into a prototype software product under MATLABr. The potential for wide-ranging commercial applications is tremendous since we will be developing the first-evercommercially available flow control design software package. The proposed software product represents a dramatic enhancement over current status of tools for flow control design. Since the software tool features primitives for flow control design forthe first time, the potential commercial applications are enormous. The technology will have broad commercial and military utility. The potential product from this effort will be a software product for PC or workstation containing the computational toolsfor generating from a PDE or high-order finite element model, a suitably accurate reduced-order ODE which is compatible with typical workstation control design capabilities. Such a tool will be very beneficial to aerospace companies involved in thecontrol design of high-performance systems which need to model complex fluid, structure, and thermal interactions.