Shaft Speed Control of Laboratory Gas Turbine Engine

The paper presents a modern control-based system design approach for ensuring stability and performance of a laboratory gas turbine engine, between various operation ranges. The primary objective of the control design is to compute the required fuel flow to the engine such that the shaft speed of a gas turbine engine tracks its commanded signal. A nonlinear controller, using Lyapunov based feedback control technique, is implemented on a physics-based model of the laboratory engine to improve the tracking response of shaft speed. The mathematical model of a gas turbine engine is developed using the First principle which sufficiently captures the steady state, as well as the dynamic behavior of a gas turbine engine. The mathematical model has also been validated against the experimental data. Simulation results indicate that the proposed control design approach is quite successful in obtaining satisfactory performance of the engine. Copyright (C) 2019. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.