Model reference adaptive control for aero-engine based on system equilibrium manifold expansion model

The role of control system for aero-engine is to provide sufficient thrust and maintain physical and operational limits. Model reference adaptive control (MRAC) technique has been paid more attention for advantages in eliminating the effects of uncertainties arising from nonlinearity or component degradation and satisfying both safety and performance requirements in the entire flight envelope. However, due to the accuracy of aero-engine models, the implementation of the MRAC algorithm is challenging. In this paper, an MRAC architecture based on equilibrium manifold expansion (EME) model for an aero-engine is presented. An EME model is taken as the reference model in this architecture, which has high accuracy in the aero-engine modelling and contains both dynamic and steady-state characteristics of aero-engine. By using Lyapunov stability method, an MRAC based on EME model is designed and used to control the aero-engine obtaining desired performance. In the designed controller, uncertainty arising from component degradation of the aero-engine is estimated and the values of the uncertainty are replaced by the estimator. In order to indicate the control performance of the method provided in this article, the proposed MRAC architecture has been tested on a hardware-in-loop simulation platform, the simulation results have shown that compared the control performance with other traditional controllers, the aero-engine could quickly provide the desired control requirements without steady-state errors under the control of designed MRAC.