Dynamics of aerospace vehicles

The focus of this research was to address the modeling, including model reduction, of flexible aerospace vehicles, with special emphasis on models used in dynamic analysis and/or guidance and control system design. In the modeling, it is critical that the key aspects of the system being modeled be captured in the model. In this work, therefore, aspects of the vehicle dynamics critical to control design were important. In this regard, fundamental contributions were made in the areas of stability robustness analysis techniques, model reduction techniques, and literal approximations for key dynamic characteristics of flexible vehicles. All these areas are related. In the development of a model, approximations are always involved, so control systems designed using these models must be robust against uncertainties in these models

Balanced Truncation of Networked Linear Passive Systems

This paper studies model order reduction of multi-agent systems consisting of identical linear passive subsystems, where the interconnection topology is characterized by an undirected weighted graph. Balanced truncation based on a pair of specifically selected generalized Gramians is implemented on the asymptotically stable part of the full-order network model, which leads to a reduced-order system preserving the passivity of each subsystem. Moreover, it is proven that there exists a coordinate transformation to convert the resulting reduced-order model to a state-space model of Laplacian dynamics. Thus, the proposed method simultaneously reduces the complexity of the network structure and individual agent dynamics, and it preserves the passivity of the subsystems and the synchronization of the network. Moreover, it allows for the a priori computation of a bound on the approximation error. Finally, the feasibility of the method is demonstrated by an example

Modeling of Transitional Channel Flow Using Balanced Proper Orthogonal Decomposition

We study reduced-order models of three-dimensional perturbations in linearized channel flow using balanced proper orthogonal decomposition (BPOD). The models are obtained from three-dimensional simulations in physical space as opposed to the traditional single-wavenumber approach, and are therefore better able to capture the effects of localized disturbances or localized actuators. In order to assess the performance of the models, we consider the impulse response and frequency response, and variation of the Reynolds number as a model parameter. We show that the BPOD procedure yields models that capture the transient growth well at a low order, whereas standard POD does not capture the growth unless a considerably larger number of modes is included, and even then can be inaccurate. In the case of a localized actuator, we show that POD modes which are not energetically significant can be very important for capturing the energy growth. In addition, a comparison of the subspaces resulting from the two methods suggests that the use of a non-orthogonal projection with adjoint modes is most likely the main reason for the superior performance of BPOD. We also demonstrate that for single-wavenumber perturbations, low-order BPOD models reproduce the dominant eigenvalues of the full system better than POD models of the same order. These features indicate that the simple, yet accurate BPOD models are a good candidate for developing model-based controllers for channel flow.Comment: 35 pages, 20 figure

Passivity-preserving parameterized model order reduction using singular values and matrix interpolation

We present a parameterized model order reduction method based on singular values and matrix interpolation. First, a fast technique using grammians is utilized to estimate the reduced order, and then common projection matrices are used to build parameterized reduced order models (ROMs). The design space is divided into cells, and a Krylov subspace is computed for each cell vertex model. The truncation of the singular values of the merged Krylov subspaces from the models located at the vertices of each cell yields a common projection matrix per design space cell. Finally, the reduced system matrices are interpolated using positive interpolation schemes to obtain a guaranteed passive parameterized ROM. Pertinent numerical results validate the proposed technique