The Role of Control in Design: from Fixing Problems to the Design of Dynamics
We will summarize lessons learned in industrial research on mitigation of flow and structure oscillations in jet engines. We will show how the decisions on the control system architecture impact the achievable level of suppression of oscillations. Attempts to introduce control late in the design process and without proper attention to control architecture often fail because of high cost to modify the design to add on active control. We will also show how certain aspects of design (symmetry) contribute to the origin of detrimental oscillations and point out how the dynamical systems and control theory methods can guide the design to prevent the oscillations. The control and dynamics methods used early in design allow one to manipulate the physical feedback loops in the system to create beneficial dynamics and exploit design flexibility at low cost.
Andrzej Banaszuk, United Technologies Research Center