Real-time simulation test-bed for an industrial gas turbine engine's controller

A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test for a control unit of an industrial gas turbine engine is performed to evaluate the designed controller. Although the dynamic performance of the studied gas turbine is strictly related to the variable inlet guide vain (VIGV) position, one of the main challenges is to develop an engine model considering VIGV variations. The model should also be capable of real time simulation. Accordingly, the gas turbine is numerically modeled using bond graph concepts. To demonstrate the operational reliability of the engine's control strategy, the control algorithm is implemented on an industrial hardware as an embedded system. This is then put into a HIL test along with the engine model. The actual component (controller) and the virtual engine model are the hardware and software parts of the HIL test, respectively. In this experiment, the interaction between the real part and the rest of the system is compared with that of the completely numerical model in which the controller is a simulated software-based model as is the engine itself. Finally, the results indicate that the physical constraints of the engine are successfully satisfied through the implementation of control algorithms on the utilized hardware.