Control of Deep-Hysteresis Aeroengine Compressors¹

Frequencies of higher-order modes of fluid dynamic phenomena participating in aeroengine compressor instabilities far exceed the bandwidth of available (affordable) actuators. For this reason, most of the heretofore experimentally validated control designs for aeroengine compressors have been via low-order models—specifically, via the famous Moore-Greitzer cubic model (MG3). While MG3 provides a good qualitative description of open-loop dynamic behavior, it does not capture the main difficulties for control design. In particular, it fails to exhibit the so-called “right-skew” property which distinguishes the deep hysteresis observed on high-performance axial compressors from a small hysteresis present in the MG3 model. In this paper we study fundamental feedback control problems associated with deep-hysteresis compressors. We first derive a parametrization of the MG3 model which exhibits the right skew property. Our approach is based on representing the compressor characteristic as a convex combination of a usual cubic polynomial and a nonpolynomial term carefully chosen so that an entire family of right-skew compressors can be spanned using a single parameter ε. Then we develop a family of controllers which are applicable not only to the particular parametrization, but to general Moore-Greitzer type models with arbitrary compressor characteristics. For each of our controllers we show that it achieves a supercritical (soft) bifurcation, that is, instead of an abrupt drop into rotating stall, it guarantees a gentle descent with a small stall amplitude. Two of the controllers have novel, simple, sensing requirements: one employs only the measurement of pressure rise and rotating stall amplitude, while the other uses only pressure rise and the mass flow rate (1D sensing). Some of the controllers which show excellent results for the MG3 model fail on the deep-hysteresis compressor model, thus justifying our focus on deep-hysteresis compressors. Our results also confirm experimentally observed difficulties for control of compressors that have a high value of Greitzer’s B parameter. We address another key issue for control of rotating stall and surge—the limited actuator bandwidth—which is critical because even the fastest control valves are often too slow compared to the rates of compressor instabilities. Our conditions show an interesting trade-off: as the actuator bandwidth decreases, the sensing requirements become more demanding. Finally, we go on to disprove a general conjecture in the compressor control community that the feedback of mass flow rate, known to be beneficial for shallow-hysteresis compressors, is also beneficial for deep-hysteresis compressors. [S0022-0434(00)03101-4]