Monday, September 22, 2008
IFOS announces award of Phase I SBIR for “Stability and Performance Analysis of Turbine Engines under Fiber Optic Networked Distributed Control Architecture.”

Gas Turbine Engine Control is one of the most complex tasks ever attempted. Currently, a centralized architecture system, Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC), is being widely used. However, new engine performance technologies started to increase the burden of FADEC. This has necessitated the beginning of a new phase of development, Distributed Engine Control (DEC). The advantages of DEC such as modularity, maintenance management, and fault detection have been well established in the engine control community. One of the major challenges in implementation of DEC is selection of communication architecture and functional partitioning of centralized controller. In this research, IFOS and Ohio State University have devised a methodology that improves the stability and performance of the overall propulsion system under various communication constraints. In this direction, IFOS initially plans to make use of off-the-shelf network architecture. In Phase I, the IFOS team addresses the issues of packet dropouts, time delay and bandwidth constraints in the Networked Control Systems (NCS) and their impact on stability and performance of turbine engine. A decentralized framework consisting of a two level controller is proposed. Using this approach, improved encoders and decoders will be designed to maintain system stability under these communication constraints.

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