Limit protection, which frequently exists as an auxiliary part in control systems, is not the primary motive of control but is a necessary guarantee of safety. As in the case of aircraft engine control, the main objective is to provide the desired thrust based on the position of the throttle; nevertheless, limit protection is indispensable to keep the engine operating within limits.
There are plenty of candidates that can be applied to design the regulators for limit protection. PID control with gain-scheduling technique has been used for decades in the aerospace industry. This classic approach suggests linearizing the original nonlinear model at different power-level points, developing PID controllers correspondingly, and then scheduling the linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers according to system states. Sliding mode control (SMC) is well-known with mature theories and numerous successful applications. With the one-sided convergence property, SMC is especially suitable for limit protection tasks. In the case of aircraft engine control, SMC regulators have been developed to supplant traditional linear regulators, where SMC can strictly keep relevant outputs within their limits and improve the control performance.
In aircraft engine control field, we all know that the plant is a nonlinear system. However, the present design of the sliding controller is carried out with linear models, which severely restricts the valid scope of the controller. Even if the gain scheduling technique is adopted, the stability of the whole systems cannot be theoretically proved.
Research of linear parameter varying (LPV) system throws light on a class of nonlinear control problems. In present works, we propose a controller design method based on the LPV model to solve the engines control problem and achieve considerable effectiveness.
In this paper, we discuss the design of a sliding controller for limit protection task of aircraft engines, the plant of which is described as an LPV system instead of LTI models. We define the sliding surface as tracking errors and, with the aid of vertex property, present the stability analysis of the closed-loop system on the sliding surface. An SMC law is designed to guarantee that the closed-loop system is globally attracted to the sliding surface. Hot day (ISA+30° C) takeoff simulations based on a reliable turbofan model are presented, which test the proposed method for temperature protection and verify its stability and effectiveness.
