Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation Testbed Development for Distributed Turbine Engine Control Systems

Distributed system architectures are gaining attention for their use in modern control systems because they provide a few important advantages over the traditional ones such as a smaller computational load required per component, tolerance to their component failures, and the ease of fixing them. A turbine engine is one of the applications that could benefit from these distributed architectures. Despite the benefits, the distributed architecture requires special attention to its common communication network since it becomes a backbone of the entire system. Although a backup network can be used to improve the overall reliability, it would be beneficial to develop understandings of the system behaviors due to underlying imperfections of the communication network such as noises, delays, and packet losses. To study these variables, the hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the full authority digital engine control system must be constructed in order to execute the developed software on the target hardware. This allows us to differentiate between the simulations of engine physics running on a high-performance computer, and of the control algorithm and software driver implemented on the embedded hardware aimed to be used on the actual turbine engine system. Besides, it allows us to implement a common communication network which is not possible for the case of doing software-in-the-loop. Once the system is separated, we can perform the experiments for this hardware in an extreme environment with high temperature and pressure where they are supposed to be during the actual engine operation. Therefore, this work aims to develop the testbed for performing this concept of hardware-in-the-loop simulation. This paper presents a detailed development of a hardware-in-the-loop testbed for distributed turbine engine control systems. Furthermore, the experiments are conducted in order to make a comparison with the software-in-the-loop simulation.