Hierarchical Control of Aircraft Electro-Thermal Systems

A hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) approach is developed for energy management of aircraft electro-thermal systems. High-power electrical systems on board modern and future aircraft perform a variety of mission- and flight-critical tasks, while thermal management systems actively cool the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on control systems technology 2020-07, Vol.28 (4), p.1218-1232
Main Authors: Koeln, Justin P., Pangborn, Herschel C., Williams, Matthew A., Kawamura, Malia L., Alleyne, Andrew G.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:A hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) approach is developed for energy management of aircraft electro-thermal systems. High-power electrical systems on board modern and future aircraft perform a variety of mission- and flight-critical tasks, while thermal management systems actively cool these electronics to satisfy component-specific temperature constraints, ensuring safe and reliable operation. In this paper, coordination of these electrical and thermal systems is performed using a hierarchical control approach that decomposes the multi-energy domain, constrained optimization problem into smaller, more computationally efficient problems that can be solved in real-time. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experimental testbed is used to evaluate the proposed hierarchical MPC in comparison to a baseline controller for a scaled, laboratory representation of an aircraft electro-thermal system. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline controller across a range of electrical loading in terms of both efficient energy management and constraint satisfaction.
ISSN:1063-6536
1558-0865
DOI:10.1109/TCST.2019.2905221