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A MasterSlave Approach to Aircraft Engine Bleed Flow Sharing Control

Guangjun Liu, Guozhong Bao, Chun Ho Lam, and Jin Jiang

AbstractA masterslave control strategy is developed for ow sharing control of multiple engine systems, applicable to aircraft and industrial plants. Under the proposed control strategy, one of airow channels is designated as the master control channel, and its pressure is regulated using pressure sensor measurement. The remaining airow channels are treated as the slave channels. The air mass ow is also measured in the master channel, and the airow sensor output of the master channel is utilized to slave the other channels, which are ow-controlled. The proposed strategy avoids simultaneous pressure control of multiple channels and controls the ow sharing error directly with a feedback loop. The theoretical aspect of the proposed scheme has been analyzed using the relative gain array (RGA) technique, and the effectiveness of the proposed control method has been conrmed by results of analysis, computer simulations and experiments. Index TermsAirow sharing control, control systems, engines, feedback, masterslave control.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE development of turbine engines has led not only to advances in thrust generation, but also to the evolution of aircraft pneumatic system design, especially for transport type aircraft. A modern turbine engine is an excellent source of high-pressure and high-temperature air that can be bled from the compressors, and then be used for various purposes on the aircraft. These include, for example, air-conditioning/heating, wing and engine anti-ice protection, as well as windscreen demisting and rain dispersal. Most of commercial and military aircraft utilizing turbine engine propulsion units are powered by two or more turbine engines. It has been recognized for some time that in order to operate a multiengine aircraft more efciently, it is desirable to extract bleed air from all of the engines equally, especially when advanced high performance engines are installed on the aircraft. Bleed ow sharing among multiple engines has been attempted in the past based on pressure control of each channel, but with limited success at relatively low steady-state accuracy and slow dynamic responses due to strong dynamic coupling among the channels. The overall system accuracy and efciency have to be sacriced to maintain acceptable stability margin of the control system. Bruun [1]

Manuscript received August 31, 2004; revised May 3, 2005. Manuscript received in nal form July 25, 2005. Recommended by Associate Editor A. Stefanopoulou. This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Honeywell Engines and Systems. G. Liu and G. Bao are with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3 Canada (e-mail: gjliu@ryerson.ca). C. H. Lam is with the Honeywell Engines & Systems, Mississauga, ON L5L 3S6 Canada. J. Jiang is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B9 Canada (e-mail: jjiang@eng.uwo.ca). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TCST.2005.857406

discloses a bleed airow sharing technique for a two engine system that uses a venturi and a pressure sensor to estimate the bleed ow in each engine bleed ow path. The difference in the two ow signals is then conditioned to drive the pressure regulator in each engine bleed ow path. Another two US patents [2] issued to Benson disclose a bleed ow control method for each engine using a pressure regulator upstream of a heat exchanger (HX). Since the bleed air pressure drop across the HX is a function of the ow rate, the pressure drop is used as the feedback signal to control the ow rate. Despite all these efforts, balancing bleed ow extraction in conventional systems has not been entirely satisfactory. The engine that is required to supply more bleed air will tend to have higher stress and may have to be overhauled or replaced sooner. In this brief, a masterslave control strategy is proposed, mathematically analyzed and experimentally tested for engine bleed ow sharing control system design. In the proposed strategy, one of the channels is selected as the master channel, and the pressure at the inlet of the downstream systems receiving the bleed air is controlled to achieve a desirable inlet pressure range. To slave the remaining airow control channels, the mass ow rate of the master channel is also measured, and this measured airow rate is then utilized as the airow set point for the slave channels, which are ow-controlled. In addition, this control strategy enables the ow to be equalized for each engine without the need of the knowledge on the total ow demand from the downstream systems where the bleed airow is used. Hence, this control approach is self-contained and can work independently of the environmental control systems (ECS) or other load demands and controllers, which is often an essential requirement in aircraft systems development. The masterslave control strategy can be tailored for a two, three, four or more engine bleed air systems (BAS) [3]. The analysis based on relative gain array (RGA), numerical simulation and test results have conrmed the effectiveness of the proposed method. The concept of masterslave control strategy has been utilized in various areas, such as power electronics. Hur and Nam [4] proposed a robust load-sharing control scheme for parallel-connected pulsewidth modulation converters and a speed and tension control for a bridle roll system in a steel mill. Rajagopalan et al. [5] developed a masterslave current sharing control strategy and applied it to a paralleled dc/dc converter system where an explicit current sharing mechanism is required to ensure proper operation. More applications of the masterslave control concept can be found in [6][8]. In the proposed masterslave control system architecture, the ow sharing is directly controlled, rather than indirectly by controlling the pressure errors in all channels, which is a more

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Fig. 1. Illustrative diagram of a two-engine BAS.

stringent control problem. In this sense, the proposed control strategy is conceptually similar to the cross-coupling control of coordinated contour following in machining operations [9], [10] and more recently for mobile robot control [11], where the most signicant error is directly controlled to improve accuracy and robustness over individual drive loop control. The rest of the brief is organized as follows. In Section II, an engine bleed ow sharing system is described, and the dynamic model is presented. The proposed control method and analysis are presented in Section III. The proposed method has been examined by simulation and experiments, and the results are presented in Section IV and Section V. Concluding remarks are given in Section VI.

Fig. 2. Block diagram representation of the two-engine BAS. TABLE I PARAMETER VALUES OF THE TRANSFER FUNCTIONS IN FIG. 2

II. ENGINE BLEED FLOW SHARING SYSTEM AND ITS DYNAMIC MODEL A. Engine Bleed Flow Sharing System A simplied illustrative diagram of a two-engine BAS under consideration is shown in Fig. 1. To regulate the engine bleed pressure, and to provide over temperature and over pressure protection, the bleed air from each engine passes through a pressure regulator and shutoff valve rst. The valve regulates the downstream pressure before the bleed air passes through a precooler HX. In this work, we assume that the channels are of identical physical construction, and each channel is instrumented with a pressure transducer and a ow sensor downstream the HX. The bleed air ows with lower pressures and temperatures from both channels are merged into one stream to feed the downstream ECS or other pneumatic loads. In Fig. 1, , and denote ow rate in lb/min, absolute pressure in psia and temperature in degree Rankine (Fahrenand heit), respectively. represents volume in in . , are pneumatic pressure regulators with inner feedback loops. and are primary pressure regulating valves. B. Linearized Model of the Two-Engine BAS For the example of the two-engine transport airplane BAS under consideration, a transfer function block diagram is derived from linearized component models and is shown in Fig. 2. The system inputs and are the inputs to the pressure regand , as indicated in Fig. 1, and , , and ulators are the valve angular displacements and valve opening areas and , respectively. The transfer of pressure regulators

function representations of the system in Fig. 2 have the following forms:

where is the universal gas constant, 639.6 in . For the system under consideration, the time constants of 0.1 s and 0.5 s. The the pressure regulators are 3600 in , in , system parameters are , pipe diameters , . , The steady-state operating conditions are: , , , , . With a mass ow rate of 150 lb/min for each channel, the parameters in Fig. 2 are calculated and as shown in Table I. C. StateSpace Model By dening the following state variables. Channel #1 pressure . Channel #1 pressure . State variable from , no particular physical meaning. channel #2 mass airow rate .

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Channel #2 pressure . State variable from , no particular physical meaning. Node pressure . The following statespace representation is obtained from the transfer function block diagram of Fig. 2: (1) where the state vector

and the system matrices, shown in the equation at bottom of the page. The control input vector is
Fig. 3. Masterslave control strategy for an engine bleed ow sharing system.

The system output vector for the conventional pressure control is (2) where the output matrix

The system output vector for the masterslave control is (3) where the output matrix

The eigenvalues of the open-loop system matrix are , , , , , , and . Since all the eigenvalues have negative real parts, the open-loop system is stable. III. CONTROL SYSTEM DESIGN The objective of the control system for the engine bleed ow sharing control is to maintain the pressures of all channels within a predened range while equalizing the bleed air ow among all channels.

A conventional control strategy for this two-channel system is to control the pressures of both channels by two separate single-loop controllers, which determine the driving signals of both pressure regulating valves in order to maintain the presand within a prespecied range. With such a consures and have to be maintained at almost the trol strategy, same magnitude all the time in order to achieve ow sharing. Since the pneumatic impedances in the system are small, a small disturbance in the engine bleed pressure could cause a large ow difference between the two channels. The proposed masterslave control strategy is illustrated in Fig. 3. With the proposed masterslave engine bleed ow sharing control architecture, any one of the bleed air channels can be chosen as the master channel, and all the remaining channels are treated as slave channels. As shown in Fig. 3, the master channel is pressure controlled, i.e., the pressure at the inlet of the downstream system receiving the bleed air is controlled to be within a desirable inlet pressure range. The pressure reference of the master channel is set to the same value as that in the conventional pressure control and is determined by the system design requirements. The mass ow rate of the master channel is also measured, which then serves as the set point for the ow-controlled slave channels. The masterslave

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control strategy avoids simultaneous pressure control of multiple channels and directly controls the ow sharing error with a feedback loop. In addition, since the set point for the ow rate of the slave channels is automatically determined by the master channel ow rate, which is governed by the downstream loads, this control strategy enables the ow balance without requiring the knowledge of the total ow demand from the system where the bleed airow is used. Hence, this control approach is self-contained and can work independently of the load demands and any other downstream controllers. Compared with independent pressure control, the proposed masterslave control strategy turns the slave channels from pressure control to ow control. The ow sharing is directly controlled, rather than indirectly by controlling the pressure in both channels. In order to implement such a ow sharing strategy, the ow sensor measurement of the master channel is used as the ow control command signal for the slave channels. Thus, the slave channel controllers do not directly respond to the pressure changes in the slave channels but only after the master channel reacts and provides a ow reference signal to the slave channels. Note that the pressure and the ow in the master channel are still affected by the responses from the slave channels due to the pneumatic coupling through the channel connections. The proposed masterslave control strategy maintains a decentralized architecture as in the independent pressure control strategy, which is often preferred for simplicity and ease of fault isolation for aircraft systems control. Engine BAS protection is a safety critical issue as high temperature and high pressure bleed air leakage can cause catastrophic damage if unchecked. Hence, sensors are normally installed for bleed leak detection, which can then trigger the shutoff of engine bleed supply if a leak is detected. The masterslave architecture, as compared with conventional independent pressure control, requires ow sensors, such as the commonly used thermal mass ow sensor in aircraft ECS. For the master channel, both ow sensor and pressure sensor are required. For the slave channels, even though only ow sensor is required in normal operations, it is highly desirable to install both ow sensor and pressure sensor so that any channel can serve as a master channel following a system reconguration. For the two-engine BAS model described in Section II, and without any loss of generality, channel #1 is designated as the master channel, and channel #2 is therefore the slave channel. and are used Assuming that the proportional controllers in the master and the slave channels, respectively, and the conand are determined as troller output signals (4) (5) In the state feedback form, (4) and (5) can be written as (6) where is the state feedback gain matrix.

Fig. 4. Trajectory of the dominant pole as the controller gain increases.

For the masterslave control strategy, the state feedback gain matrix is (7) In the conventional pressure control strategy, the controller and can be written as output signals (8) (9) The corresponding state feedback gain matrix would be (10) Since the master channel consists of a single pressure control loop in both strategies, this controller can be tuned independently rst. Assuming that the gain of the master controller is set to unity, the inuence of the magnitude of the slave channel control gain on the system performance can be examined. Fig. 4 shows the trajectory of the dominant pole of the closed-loop system as the slave channel control gain is increased. It can be seen that the dominant pole of the closed-loop system moves away from the origin as increases in the masterslave control strategy. While in the conventional pressure control strategy, the location of the dominant pole of the closed-loop system stays close to the origin despite of the control gain changes. This indicates that the dynamic response of the closed-loop system will be faster in the masterslave control than that in the conventional pressure control when a is selected. higher controller gain To investigate the loop interactions further, the analysis is carried out using the RGA technique for the conventional pressure control and the masterslave control strategies. From the system and , the steady-state gain matrix model matrices , (SSGM) for the pressure control is obtained as SSGM and for the masterslave control SSGM is obtained using and as SSGM ,

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Fig. 5. Step change of 10 psi in the master channel pressure reference (PI control).

Fig. 6. Step change of 10 psi in the engine #1 bleed pressure (PI control).

Then the RGA for the pressure control is calculated as RGA and for the masterslave control RGA The pressure control RGA matrix shows signicant steadystate interactions between the two channels. Since only the diagonal elements are positive, the preferred control pairs are using to control and to control . The RGA matrix diagonal element value is 18.335 (about 25.3 db changes), indicating that the pressure control open-loop gain is small when the other pressure control loop is closed. Consequently, it is tempting to use a large control gain to achieve pressure control. However, if one of the pressure control loops is either open or fails, the chosen control channel gain could be too high and cause stability problem. Hence, the control gains of both pressure channels need to be de-tuned to achieve better control integrity just in case of some component failures. Also, the sum

of the absolute value of these elements is large (71.34), suggesting that the pressure control system is likely to be ill conditioned. All these indicate that it is more complicated to apply single-inputsingle-output (SISO) design techniques to achieve desirable dynamic performance and multi-inputmulti-output (MIMO) control is likely required to achieve satisfactory pressure control performance. For the masterslave approach, all the RGA matrix elements are about 0.5. In this case, the open-loop gain characteristics of each control channel increases by about 100% (about 6 db change) when the other control channel is closed. The control interaction is therefore signicantly less when compared with the aforementioned pressure control approach. Also, the sum of the absolute value of all RGA elements is 2, suggesting that the master slave control system is not ill conditioned, and the decentralized SISO control approach for the pressure and ow difference is possible. IV. SIMULATION RESULTS Simulations are performed using Matlab/Simulink to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed masterslave control strategy based on the statespace model of the two-engine BAS.

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Fig. 7. Test rig for ow sharing control studies. TABLE II MAIN COMPONENTS IN THE TEST RIG

Fig. 8. PI control experiment: step change of 5 psi in the master channel pressure reference.

When proportional only control is used, there exists steady-state error in both the master channel pressure control and the ow sharing control, which can be removed when an integral control is introduced. Figs. 5 and 6 show the system step responses. for the master The PI controller parameters are set to for the slave channel conchannel controller and troller, and the integral time is set to 0.5 s for both controllers. The sensor dynamics has been ignored in the simulations. A quick dip in the initial ow response of the slave channel has been observed from the results of the simulation. To conrm that this is a nonminimum phase (NMP) behavior by analysis, the zeros of the transfer function from the pressure reference of the master channel to the ow rate of the slave channel are obtained using the system model in Section II-C as

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS The proposed masterslave ow sharing control strategy is also tested experimentally in laboratory settings. The test rig developed in our laboratory is shown in Fig. 7, which consists of four parallel channels. In addition to an electrically actuated control valve, each channel is equipped with a thermal mass ow sensor, two pressure transducers, and several manual valves for reconguring the system. A compressor charges two high-pressure tanks to a maximum pressure of 100 psig. An electrical control valve is installed between the tanks and the test rig to control the air pressure at the inlet of the test rig. The inlet air pressure can be kept between 2030 psig for approximately 400 s when the mass ow rate is controlled at about 10 lb/min. Table II lists the main components of the test rig. Fig. 8 shows the experimental results of the masterslave control, where a PI controller is used for both the master and , slave channels. The controller parameters are set to 2 s for the master channel controller and , 10 s for the slave channel controller. The saw-teeth shape in the pressure responses and ow responses are due to the upstream pressure uctuation, caused

Zeros

There is a pair of complex zeros with a positive real part in the transfer function, which causes the NMP behavior in the system.

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mainly by the control valve sensitivity. The slow pressure and ow responses are partly due to the slow ow sensor dynamics, which has a time constant of about 10 s. However, from the experimental results, it can be seen that the mass ow rate of the slave channel follows that of the master channel satisfactorily. In addition, although not being controlled directly, the slave channel pressure is approximately the same as that of the master channel. When PI controllers are used, the steady-state errors are nearly eliminated in both the pressures and ow rates, and excellent ow sharing control has been achieved. NMP behavior is also noticed in the ow response of the slave channel as shown in Fig. 8, which is consistent with the analysis and simulation results for the aircraft BAS model in Section IV. VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS In this brief, a masterslave control strategy for multi-engine BAS ow sharing control is proposed. Based on a linearized statespace model of a two-engine BAS, analysis and simulation results have conrmed that the proposed control scheme can reduce the interaction effect among the channels in comparison with the conventional individual pressure control. Experimental results with an airow sharing control test rig have also demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed masterslave control strategy.

REFERENCES
[1] E. R. Bruun, Bleed Air Flow Regulators With Flow Balance, US Patent no. 5 155 991, 1991. [2] P. A. Benson, Aircraft Engine Bleed Air Flow Balancing Technique, US Patent Nos. 4 765 131 and 4 765 131, 1988. [3] G. Liu and C. Lam, Master-Slave Engine Bleed Flow Sharing Control Method and System, US Patent no. 6 782 701, Aug. 31, 2004. [4] N. Hur and K. Nam, A robust load-sharing control scheme for parallelconnected multisystems, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 871879, Aug. 2000. [5] J. Rajagopalan, K. Xing, Y. Guo, F. C. Lee, and B. Manners, Modeling and dynamic analysis of paralleled dc/dc converters with masterslave current sharing control, in Proc. Applied Power Electronics Conf. Expo., vol. 2, 1996, pp. 678684. [6] M. Jordan, UC3807 load share IC simplies parallel power supply design, in Unitrode Product and Application Handbook. Dallas, TX: Texas Instruments, 19951996, pp. 10-23710-246. [7] H.-R. Wu, T. Kohama, Y. Kodera, T. Ninomiya, and F. Ihara, Load-current sharing for parallel operation of dc-dc converters, in Proc. Power Electronics Specialists Conf. (PESC), 1993, pp. 101107. [8] I. Batarseh, K. Siri, and J. Banda, An alternate approach for improving current-sharing in parallel-connected dc-dc converter systems, in Proc. High Frequency Power Conversion (HFPC) Conf., 1994, pp. 102119. [9] P. Y. Li, Coordinated contour following control for machining operationsa survey, in Proc. Amer. Control Conf., 1999, pp. 45434547. [10] Y. Koren, Cross-coupling biaxial computer control for manufacturing systems, ASME J. Dyn. Syst. Meas. Control, vol. 102, pp. 265272, 1980. [11] L. Feng, Y. Koren, and J. Borenstein, Cross-coupling motion controller for mobile robots, IEEE Control Syst. Mag., vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 3543, 1993.