Application of Lanczos vectors to control design of flexible structures

This report covers research conducted during the first year of the two-year grant. The research, entitled 'Application of Lanczos Vectors to Control Design of Flexible Structures' concerns various ways to obtain reduced-order mathematical models for use in dynamic response analyses and in control design studies. This report summarizes research described in several reports and papers that were written under this contract. Extended abstracts are presented for technical papers covering the following topics: controller reduction by preserving impulse response energy; substructuring decomposition and controller synthesis; model reduction methods for structural control design; and recent literature on structural modeling, identification, and analysis

Robust scheduled control of longitudinal flight with handling quality satisfaction

Classic flight control systems are still widely used in the industry because of acquired experience and good understanding of their structure. Nevertheless, with more stringent constraints, it becomes difficult to easily fulfil all the criteria with these classic control laws. On the other hand, modern methods can handle many constraints but fail to produce low order controllers. The following methodology proposed in this paper addresses both classic and modern flight control issues, to offer a solution that leverages the strengths of both approaches. First, an H∞ synthesis is performed in order to get controllers which satisfy handling qualities and are robust withrespect to mass and centre of gravity variations. These controllers are then reduced and structured by using robust modal control techniques. In conclusion, a self-scheduling technique is described that will schedule these controllers over the entire flight envelope

Plug-and-play and coordinated control for bus-connected AC islanded microgrids

This paper presents a distributed control architecture for voltage and frequency stabilization in AC islanded microgrids. In the primary control layer, each generation unit is equipped with a local controller acting on the corresponding voltage-source converter. Following the plug-and-play design approach previously proposed by some of the authors, whenever the addition/removal of a distributed generation unit is required, feasibility of the operation is automatically checked by designing local controllers through convex optimization. The update of the voltage-control layer, when units plug -in/-out, is therefore automatized and stability of the microgrid is always preserved. Moreover, local control design is based only on the knowledge of parameters of power lines and it does not require to store a global microgrid model. In this work, we focus on bus-connected microgrid topologies and enhance the primary plug-and-play layer with local virtual impedance loops and secondary coordinated controllers ensuring bus voltage tracking and reactive power sharing. In particular, the secondary control architecture is distributed, hence mirroring the modularity of the primary control layer. We validate primary and secondary controllers by performing experiments with balanced, unbalanced and nonlinear loads, on a setup composed of three bus-connected distributed generation units. Most importantly, the stability of the microgrid after the addition/removal of distributed generation units is assessed. Overall, the experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed modular control design framework, where generation units can be added/removed on the fly, thus enabling the deployment of virtual power plants that can be resized over time

Coprime Factor Reduction of H-infinity Controllers

We consider the efficient solution of the coprime factorization based H infinity controller approximation problems by using frequency-weighted balancing related model reduction approaches. It is shown that for a class of frequency-weighted performance preserving coprime factor reduction as well as for a relative error coprime factor reduction method, the computation of the frequency-weighted controllability and observability grammians can be done by solving Lyapunov equations of the order of the controller. The new approach can be used in conjunction with accuracy enhancing square-root and balancing-free techniques developed for the balancing related coprime factors based model reduction

Interpolatory Weighted-H2 Model Reduction

This paper introduces an interpolation framework for the weighted-H2 model reduction problem. We obtain a new representation of the weighted-H2 norm of SISO systems that provides new interpolatory first order necessary conditions for an optimal reduced-order model. The H2 norm representation also provides an error expression that motivates a new weighted-H2 model reduction algorithm. Several numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

A decentralized linear quadratic control design method for flexible structures

A decentralized suboptimal linear quadratic control design procedure which combines substructural synthesis, model reduction, decentralized control design, subcontroller synthesis, and controller reduction is proposed for the design of reduced-order controllers for flexible structures. The procedure starts with a definition of the continuum structure to be controlled. An evaluation model of finite dimension is obtained by the finite element method. Then, the finite element model is decomposed into several substructures by using a natural decomposition called substructuring decomposition. Each substructure, at this point, still has too large a dimension and must be reduced to a size that is Riccati-solvable. Model reduction of each substructure can be performed by using any existing model reduction method, e.g., modal truncation, balanced reduction, Krylov model reduction, or mixed-mode method. Then, based on the reduced substructure model, a subcontroller is designed by an LQ optimal control method for each substructure independently. After all subcontrollers are designed, a controller synthesis method called substructural controller synthesis is employed to synthesize all subcontrollers into a global controller. The assembling scheme used is the same as that employed for the structure matrices. Finally, a controller reduction scheme, called the equivalent impulse response energy controller (EIREC) reduction algorithm, is used to reduce the global controller to a reasonable size for implementation. The EIREC reduced controller preserves the impulse response energy of the full-order controller and has the property of matching low-frequency moments and low-frequency power moments. An advantage of the substructural controller synthesis method is that it relieves the computational burden associated with dimensionality. Besides that, the SCS design scheme is also a highly adaptable controller synthesis method for structures with varying configuration, or varying mass and stiffness properties

Controller reduction for linear systems

This dissertation proposes some H-infinity and H2 performance preserving controller reduction methods for linear systems. The proposed methods can guarantee robust stability and performance for the closed-loop system with the reduced order controllers. Several H-infinity stability and performance preserving controller reduction methods are proposed in this dissertation. It is shown that the weighting functions used in the proposed controller reduction methods can be directly obtained from the parametrization of the H-infinity controllers. Hence, comparing with the most existing controller reduction approaches, the proposed controller reduction methods require less computation and are easy to apply. At the same time, several algorithms are proposed to simplify some existing controller reduction algorithms. Examples are explored to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed controller reduction methods. The parallel problems are also discussed for H2 performance preserving controller reductions. Furthermore, some parallel controller reduction methods are presented to reduce controllers for preserving the closed-loop system stability and performance. Similarly, relevant simplified algorithms are also proposed for those existing H2 performance preserving controller reduction algorithms. One example is explored to demonstrate those controller reduction methods. Another H-infinity controller reduction method is introduced for SISO system to maintain the closed-loop system stability and performance. This approach provides upper bound on the controller weighting function for general SISO H-infinity control problem, and then a lower order controller is provided using frequency weighted model reduction method, which preserves stability and performance for the closed-loop system. Finally, some possible future work are outlined