IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO.
5, SEPTEMBER 1998
Brief Papers
Frequency-Domain Identification of Gas Turbine Dynamics
Ceri Evans, David Rees, and Dave Hill
Abstract— The identification of the fuel flow to shaft speed
dynamics of a twin-shaft gas turbine is addressed, with the aim
of validating thermodynamic engine models. A measured input
signal must be used in estimation in order to exclude the fuel
feed dynamics from the model. This has been shown to present
problems when fitting discrete models to engine data, and this
paper examines the direct estimation of s-domain models in the
frequency domain. A number of different multisine test signals
were applied to the engine for the purposes of model estimation
and nonlinear detection. The use of frequency-domain techniques
is shown to produce high-quality models, and the tests also
yield information on the levels of noise and nonlinearity and the
length of the pure time delay. This work illustrates the potential
of frequency-domain techniques for modeling systems where a
physical interpretation is to be made of the model and where the
need for accuracy requires that a measured input signal be used
in estimation.
Index Terms—Frequency domain, gas turbines, multisine test
signals, system identification, system testing.
I. INTRODUCTION
G AS TURBINE engines were originally designed for
aircraft propulsion, but are now extensively used in aero,
marine, and industrial applications. There is also considerable
crossfertilization between steam and gas turbine technolo-
gies, such as the collaboration between Westinghouse and
Rolls Royce, resulting in the development of small bespoke
power stations based on aeroengines [1]. Gas turbines are
even finding application in a new generation of electric cars,
currently being tested by Volvo [2]. With such widespread
and increasing applications, the modeling of these engines is
an issue of some importance.
Engine models are required both in the development and
operational stages of the life of a gas turbine. Thermodynamic
models are derived during the development stage, based on
knowledge of the engine physics, and provide important
insights into the engine behavior. Such models are both
complex and nonlinear, making them unsuitable for use in
the design of engine control systems.
Manuscript received March 1, 1997; revised February 1, 1998. This work
was supported by Rolls Royce plc and the U.K. Defense Evaluation and
Research Agency at Pyestock.
C. Evans and D. Rees are with the School of Electronics, University of
Glamorgan, Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, Wales, U.K.
D. Hill is with Rolls Royce plc, Advanced Controls Division, Derby, DE24
8BJ, U.K.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1063-6536(98)06133-8.
1063–6536/98$10.00  1998 IEEE
651
It is therefore common practice to linearize the thermody-
namic models around a series of operating points and then
carry out a model-order reduction in order to arrive at models
which are suitable for control system design. Since these
models are based on a priori assumptions about the engine
physics, it is then important to validate their performance
against real engine data.
This paper deals with the linear identification of the fuel
feed to shaft speed dynamics of a Rolls Royce Spey Mk
202 engine at a single operating point. This is a typical
military twin-shaft turbofan, with a low bypass ratio and a
variable reheat nozzle. Although no longer in service, it has
the same basic architecture, for control purposes, as that of
more modern engines such as the EJ200, which is used to
power the Eurofighter [3].
A simplified diagram of a Spey engine is shown in Fig. 1,
where concentric shafts are seen to connect the compressors
at the intake end to the turbines at the nozzle end. Modern
gas turbines usually have two shafts, one connecting the
high-pressure (HP) compressor to the HP turbine and the
other connecting the low-pressure (LP) compressor to the LP
turbine. These rotate at different speeds, which are denoted
and . The shaft speeds are the primary outputs of a
gas turbine from which the internal engine pressures and the
thrust can be calculated.
The aim of this study was to estimate models which could be
used to validate existing thermodynamic models derived from
the engine physics. The poles and zeros of the estimated model
are thus to be given a physical interpretation and directly
related to the -domain poles of the linearized thermodynamic
models.
II. BACKGROUND
At the initial stages of an engine design, a thermodynamic
model is derived from the nonlinear differential equations
which govern energy transfer within the engine. The nonlinear
model is then numerically linearized about a set of operating
points, using small perturbations and evaluating the partial
derivatives. In the case of the Spey, this results in multivariable
models with five inputs, ten outputs and fifteen states.
All but two of these states are associated with rates of
change of pressure within the compressor and turbine volumes.
These states have very fast time constants, in the order of
20 ms or less, and can be eliminated by a model reduction
process. The remaining two states are the shaft speeds and
652 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998

Fig. 1. Simplified schematic of a Rolls Royce Spey engine.

transfer function models can be obtained for each of the

shafts by evaluating the transfer function matrix. These models
have one zero and two poles, with a pole-zero pair modeling
the interaction between the shafts. There is a near pole-zero
cancellation in the HP shaft model.
Initial work on validating small signal engine models was
carried out in the 1950’s on single shaft and twin shaft engines
[4], [5]. Single sine and step inputs were used to excite an
engine and -domain models calculated. The main problems
were the length of time required for the single sine tests and
the lack of a systematic way of fitting models to the data. This
made it difficult to validate the one zero, two pole models of
twin shaft engines, since the close pole-zero pairs could not
be estimated accurately.
This problem was later addressed by Cottington and Pease
[6], who presented the results of testing a number of engines
with maximum length binary sequences (MLBS’s). The am-
plitude of the perturbation signals was restricted to produce
output speed variations of no more than 2% of the maximum
in an effort to ensure a linear response and minimize
engine wear. Cottington and Pease stressed the importance
of excluding the dynamics of the fuel feed system from the
estimated model by using the measured fuel flow as the input
signal.
The development of increased computing power, along with
advances in system identification techniques, now make it
possible to apply a systematic approach to fitting parametric
models to engine data. Work conducted by Hill [7] exam-
ined the application of a range of time-domain methods to
estimating discrete -domain engine models, with the aim of
reducing engine test times, while improving the accuracy of
the estimated models and quantifying the model uncertainty.
Particular importance was placed on the identification of the
second-order effects, since they had not been adequately dealt
with in past work.
This work showed that discrete models with good in-
put–output properties could be estimated, making them suit-
able for engine simulation and control system design. How-
ever, some problems with the application of time-domain
Fig. 2. Engine measurement setup.
techniques were reported by Hill in a recent paper [8]. Un-
der certain circumstances, discrete models can be estimated
which have a continuous -domain equivalent which cannot
be realized by a physical system. This is due to the presence
of a single real negative -domain pole, which maps to a single
complex pole in the -domain.
Such models clearly cannot be used to validate the linearized
thermodynamic models. Evans [9] has shown that this effect
can be caused by using a measured bandlimited input signal in
the estimation of discrete models, or by the presence of a pure
time delay which is not an integer multiple of sampling period.
If a physical interpretation is to be made of a -domain
model, the input signal should be applied under zero-order-
hold (ZOH) conditions [10]. In this application, the measured
value of the fuel flow is used for estimation in order to
eliminate the fuel feed dynamics from the model. The fuel
feed bandlimits the input signal and, hence, violates the ZOH
condition.
III. THE MEASUREMENT PROBLEM
There are a number of problems associated with the mea-
surement of the fuel flow and shaft speeds, which will be
discussed in turn. Some of these are inherent to gas turbines,
others are a feature of the measurement transducers. A sim-
plified block diagram of the measurement setup is shown in
Fig. 2.
1) Fuel Feed System: The fuel feed system is composed of
a valve driven by a stepper motor, which exhibit both linear
and nonlinear dynamics and affect the actual fuel flow applied
to the gas turbine. It is important to eliminate these effects
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998
(a)
(b)
Fig. 3. Circular covariance of input signal. (a) Across complete data length, (b) first lag, and (c) fifth lag.
from the estimated engine model, and this is achieved by
measuring the actual fuel flow downstream of the fuel feed,
using a turbine flow meter.
2) Speed Measurement: The speed of the low pressure
shaft is measured by counting the rotations of the turbine
blades and the speed of the HP shaft by measuring the rotation
of a gear linked to the shaft itself. A series of pulses are
generated, the frequency of which depends on the shaft speed.
The number of pulses in a given interval are counted and the
resulting speed provided as the transducer output.
The engine control computer then polls this output at each
sampling instant. It should be clear that it is not possible to
incorporate any antialiasing (AA) filters into this setup, since
the conversion is from a pulse frequency to a digital value (F-
D) and no true analogue signal exists before digitizing. This
also applies to the turbine flow meter on the input.
3) Engine Control Computer: The number of samples
which can be logged in one test is limited to 15 000, and
for this reason only the demanded fuel flow, measured fuel
flow, and the two shaft speeds were recorded. Recording
the demanded fuel flow allows the generation of the test
signals to be checked and also allows the fuel feed dynamics
to be studied. The digital-to-analog converter (DAC) at the
computer output and the samplers at its input can be clocked
at different speeds, allowing signal reconstruction and data
sampling at different rates.
4) Noise: The dominant noise sources are the turbulence
in the fuel flow at the input and the vibration of the turbine
blades and jitter in the gears at the outputs. This means that the
653
(c)
input noise cannot be considered as simply measurement noise,
since the turbulence in the input fuel flow also influences the
shaft speed outputs.
5) Nonlinearities: The dynamics of a gas turbine vary
considerably within its operating range. A series of linear
models are thus estimated around a set of operating points. The
nonlinear behavior of the fuel feed system of a Pegasus engine
was studied by Godfrey and Moore [11], who proposed the use
of an inverse repeat binary sequence to reduce the influence
of the nonlinearity on the estimated model. It was thus of
interest to see if significant nonlinear effects were encountered
in these small signal tests, both with the fuel feed system and
the engine itself.
6) Combustion Delay: There is a pure time delay in the
system, which is due to the delay involved in vaporizing and
igniting the fuel in the engine. Previous tests on this engine
estimated the delay at 35 ms or less, using a cross-correlation
method. A semiempirical model of the combustion dynamics
was proposed by Bauerfeind [12] and later Thomson [13],
which predicted time delays in the order of 15 ms for a typical
engine.
IV. FREQUENCY-DOMAIN ESTIMATION
The frequency-domain techniques employed in this study
and the test signals used will now be described.
A. Estimation
Since periodic input signals were used the frequency re-
sponse function (FRF) was estimated using ratio of the mean
654 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998

TABLE I
SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIOS (dB)

output and input Fourier coefficients Frequency-domain identification has a number of clear
advantages if a physical interpretation of the model is to be
made, since an -domain model can be directly identified,
whose poles and zeros can be related to physical parameters of
(1) the system. The estimator is now available as part of a Matlab
toolbox, written by Kollár [16].

B. Test Signals
where and are the input and output spectra
at the test frequencies measured across periods. This Frequency-domain estimation is greatly simplified if peri-
was termed the estimator by Guillaume [14], who odic input signals are used and the measurements are per-
showed that it gives an asymtotically unbiased estimate of the formed under dynamic steady state conditions. The measured
FRF, if the measurements are synchronized, in the presence signals must be bandlimited and sampled at more than twice
of normally distributed noise on the real and imaginary parts the highest signal frequency in order to prevent aliasing. The
of the Fourier coefficients. lack of AA filters in the turbine measurement setup might thus
Parametric frequency-domain identification involves select- seem to preclude the use of frequency-domain techniques.
ing the parameters of an -domain model, with pure time delay This would be true if binary signals were used, since they
do not have bandlimited spectra. This is not the case if
multisine signals are used, since the total signal power can
be concentrated in the frequency range of interest. The only
higher frequency components in the signals would be those
(2) generated at the signal reconstruction frequency by the DAC.
It is, however, possible to utilize the low-pass characteristic
Employing an error-in-variables model, Pintelon et al. [15] of the fuel feed system to filter out these components, if a suf-
derived a maximum likelihood estimator of , with the ficiently high-reconstruction frequency is used. The multisines
cost function as shown in (3), given at the bottom of the page. can thus be strictly bandlimited without the use of AA filters
The variances of the input and output noises are denoted and the only aliasing present will be due to high-frequency
by and , and is their covariance. The noise.
summation is across the excitation frequencies, and is a A multisines signal is an arbitrary ensemble of harmonically
vector of the model parameters. related cosines
Double the value of is distributed with
degrees of freedom, where is the number of free parameters.
(5)
Consequently, if there are no modeling errors, the cost function
should reach a value of
where is a vector of amplitudes, a vector of harmonic
(4) numbers, the fundamental frequency, and a vector
of phases. The relative phases of the harmonics must be
The estimates are asymptotically unbiased, efficient, and carefully selected to minimize the crest factor (CF) of the
robust to various time-domain disturbances. The variances of signal. By minimizing the CF, it is possible to ensure that
the input and output noise, and their covariance, are required as the maximum possible power is injected for a given input
a priori information, but these can be estimated while making amplitude constraint, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio
the measurements if the Fourier coefficients are averaged. (SNR) and thus shortens measurement times
The nonparametric noise model is particularly attractive in
applications such as the gas turbine, since the noise is known CF (6)
to be colored, with a number of peaks in its spectrum. rms

(3)
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998 655

The approach proposed by Guillaume et al. [17] was

employed for the test signals, as it generates the lowest CF
for band limited multisines.
A great advantage of multisine signals is the flexibility
afforded in the signal design. The multisine should be designed
to concentrate the signal power within the system bandwidth,
with sufficient harmonics to allow CF minimization, give the
required spectral coverage, and allow for detection of modeling
errors. Including too many harmonics will however reduce
the power at each test frequency and consequently affect the
accuracy of the FRF, which is to be used for model validation.
It is also possible to omit certain harmonics from the mul-
tisine signal. If all the even harmonics are omitted, the signal
will be immune to even-order nonlinear distortions, since
(a)
even sums of odd harmonics will always result in nonlinear
contributions at even harmonics. If some of the odd harmonics
are also omitted it is possible to detect nonlinear effects by the
presence of output power at the omitted harmonics within the
signal bandwidth. Output power at the even harmonics will
indicate the presence of even-order nonlinearities and output
power at the omitted odd harmonics will indicate odd-order
effects [9].
Three signal designs were employed in these tests, with an
equal fundamental frequency of 0.01 Hz and roughly equal
bandwidths. The first being a signal composed of 30 odd
harmonics, termed an odd multisine
Signal 1 (7)
(b) A second signal was employed for cross-validation pur-
poses, composed of 15 odd harmonics with the same overall
bandwidth, but with its power concentrated at low frequencies.
This will be termed a quasi-log multisine since it has a
spectrum which is similar in appearance to that of a log-tone
signal
Signal 2 (8)
The third signal was designed with all the even harmonics
omitted, along with every other odd harmonic, and termed
an odd–odd multisine. This allowed the degree of nonlinear
distortion present within the linearization range of the model
to be assessed
Signal 3 (9)
A criterion is required to assess whether any of the ad-
ditional output components are indeed periodic nonlinear
contributions, or simply noise harmonics. McCormack et al.
[18] proposed using the squared coherence function, defined
for systems with a noise free input, which depends only on
the output signal

(10)

(c)
Fig. 4. Noise variances of (a) input, (b) output, and (c) absolute value of where is the output spectrum at both the excited and
covariance for HP shaft. omitted harmonics measured across periods. The quantity
656 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998
(a)
Fig. 5. Odd–odd multisine spectral amplitude at (a) HP and (b) LP shaft outputs.
will be termed the nonlinear coherence to distinguish
it from the more commonly used definition of coherence. As
becomes large, the nonlinear coherence will express the
ratio of the periodic power over the total power at each output
frequency. If the periodic component is zero, it will assume
a value of , which gives an useful bound with which to
judge the significance of the nonlinear coherence values [9].
V. DATA ANALYSIS
Tests were conducted at an operating point of 75% of
the maximum HP shaft speed and the signals imposed with
amplitudes of 10% of the steady-state fuel flow. Six periods
of each signal were measured with a sampling period of 0.2 s,
generating 500 samples per period. A detailed analysis was
made of the gathered data before proceeding with the para-
metric model estimation.
A. Synchronization
It is important that the signal reconstruction and sampling
clocks are synchronized when conducting measurements for
frequency-domain identification, since a deviation in either
clock will result in incomplete signal periods being sam-
pled. The quality of the synchronization can be checked by
examining the circular covariance of the measured signals
(11)
(b)
where is the number of samples, the sampling period,
and corresponds to a circular shift of samples to
the right. This can be calculated via the inverse fast Fourier
transform (FFT) of the signal power spectrum, with the dc
component suppressed [19]. The circular covariance of the 30
odd-harmonic input signal is plotted in Fig. 3. The periodicity
of the input is clear, and the detailed plots of the first and
fifth lags indicate that the synchronization is very good. The
maximum deviation between the clocks must be less than
0.025% (0.2/2 in 4 500 0.2).
B. Noise Analysis
The SNR’s were also calculated, beginning with an estimate
of the raw SNR from the ratio of the total power at the excited
harmonics over the total signal power. Estimates of the noise
variances and covariance were then made during the averaging
of the Fourier coefficients. These allowed the improvements in
SNR obtained by excluding the noise lines from the data, and
by averaging across six periods, to be calculated. The results
for the 30 odd-harmonic signal are listed in Table I, where it
can be seen that the SNR’s after averaging are very good, with
values of at least 40 dB in each case.
The noise variances and covariance are plotted in Fig. 4
for the 30 odd-harmonic signal, HP shaft data, which shows
stronger noise components at low frequency and also large
covariance at these frequencies. The large covariance is to
be expected since the dominant noise source at the input is
process noise, which also passes through the system and is
hence correlated with the output noise.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998
(a)
Fig. 6. Nonlinear coherence of odd–odd multisine at (a) input and (b) HP shaft output. Input harmonics (solid), omitted even harmonics (dash–dot),
and omitted odd (dotted). With 1=M bound shown dashed.
C. Nonlinearities
The influence of nonlinearities was investigated by exam-
ining the FFT of the odd–odd signal at the HP and LP shaft
outputs, shown in Fig. 5. The presence of colored noise is
clearly seen, but it is difficult to see if there are any additional
periodic components rising above the noise floor, which would
indicate the presence of nonlinear effects.
A clearer picture is obtained from the nonlinear coherence,
which is plotted in Fig. 6 for the input and the HP shaft
output, along with the bound. It is seen that only one
omitted frequency within the signal bandwidth has a significant
coherence in the input spectrum, while a series of omitted
even harmonics have a significant coherence in the output.
The coherence of the omitted odd harmonics is consistently
lower on both the input and output.
This suggests that the fuel feed can be considered as linear
over this input range, while a weak even-order nonlinearity
may be present in the gas turbine. A similar result was obtained
with the LP shaft. The influence of this even-order nonlinearity
on the estimated linear models is eliminated simply by using
odd harmonic signals. A detailed analysis of the gas turbine
nonlinearities has been presented in a previous paper by Evans
et al. [20].
VI. ESTIMATION RESULTS
Frequency-domain estimation was carried out using the
Fourier coefficients of the 30 odd-harmonic signal. The FRF’s
657
(b)
of the HP and LP shafts were estimated using the
estimator defined in (1) and their amplitudes are shown in
Fig. 7. It can be seen that the bandwidth of the signals was well
chosen, covering a drop of 17 dB on the HP shaft and 13 dB
on the LP shaft. The corresponding phase shifts vary between
10 and 85 . The results of the parametric estimation for
each of the shafts will now be discussed in turn.
A. High-Pressure Shaft
The variation of the cost function with model order is shown
in Table II. The theoretical minimum of the cost function is
also given, as this varies with the number of parameters, in
accordance with (4). The major drop in the cost function occurs
with the one-zero two-pole (1/2) model, suggesting that this
is the best structure.
Table III shows the pole and zero positions of the first three
of these models. The 1/2 model has a pole-zero pair close
to the origin, whose regions of uncertainty do overlap.
Adding another pole and zero results in an unstable model
being estimated. The frequency responses of the 0/1 and 1/2
models are shown in Figs. 8 and 9, where the additional pole
and zero are seen to be modeling a low-frequency effect.
B. Low-Pressure Shaft
The variation of the cost function with model order for
the LP shaft is presented in Table IV. The large drop in the
cost function between the 0/1 and 1/2 models shows that the
658 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998

(a) (b)
Fig. 7. Amplitude of FRF for (a) HP and (b) LP shafts.

TABLE II
COST FUNCTION FOR HP SHAFT MODELS, 30 ODD HARMONICS

TABLE III
HP SHAFT MODELS, 30 ODD HARMONICS

dynamics are at least second order. There is even a case for
selecting a 2/3 model, which conflicts with the structure of the
derived thermodynamic model.
Table V shows that the 2/3 model has a very close pole-
zero pair near to the origin. The uncertainty regions of the
pole and zero do however overlap. This close pole-zero pair is
once again modeling a low frequency effect in a similar way
to the 1/2 model for the HP shaft. The difference between the
frequency response of the 1/2 and 2/3 models is, however, so
small as to be almost indistinguishable in Fig. 10.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998 659

(a) (b)
Fig. 8. Frequency response of HP shaft model (solid) and FRF (crosses): for 0/1 model.

(a) (b)
Fig. 9. Frequency response of HP shaft model (solid) and FRF (crosses): for 1/2 model.
660 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998

TABLE IV
COST FUNCTION FOR LP SHAFT MODELS, 30 ODD HARMONICS

TABLE V
LP SHAFT MODELS, 30 ODD HARMONICS

TABLE VI
LP SHAFT MODELS, 15 QUASI-LOG HARMONICS

C. Cross Validation in the time-domain estimation of discrete models, since faster

Cross validation was performed using the quasi-log mul-
tisine and the estimated models confirmed the above results.
The LP shaft models are shown in Table VI and can be seen
to match closely those shown in Table V. A similar pattern
was found with the HP shaft.
D. Combustion Delay
The pure time delay was included as an estimation parame-
ter and Tables III, V, and VI show that values of between 13
and 21 ms were obtained for the selected models on each shaft,
which match the typical values of combustion delay previously
proposed [12], [13]. This small delay can present a problem
sampling is required in order to exactly specify the delay. This
can cause numerical problems, as the poles and zeros of the
discrete models will tend to cluster around the point .
VII. COMPARISON WITH THERMODYNAMIC MODELS
Models of the HP and LP shaft have been estimated with
a high degree of confidence from the test data and it is now
possible to compare these estimated models with the linearized
thermodynamic models derived from the engine physics.
In Table VII, the poles and zero of the HP shaft model
estimated with the 30 odd-harmonic data are compared to
those of the thermodynamic model. Each of the models has a
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998 661

TABLE VII
COMPARISON OF MODELS, HP SHAFT

TABLE VIII
COMPARISON OF MODELS, LP SHAFT

dominant pole close to the same point (around 0.1 Hz) and,
in addition, a close pole-zero pair, which indicates that the
HP shaft dynamics are predominantly first order. The major
difference is that the pole-zero pair of the estimated model is
much closer to the origin. This was shown to model a real
feature of the data, in Fig. 9, but it is clearly modeling a
different effect to that of the higher frequency pole-zero pair
in the thermodynamic model.
For the LP shaft, the 1/2 thermodynamic model is compared
to the 2/3 model estimated using the 30 odd-harmonic data
in Table VIII. The separation of the zero and poles of the
thermodynamic model is greater than with the HP shaft, which
suggests that the dynamics are at least second order.
Neglecting for a moment the close pole-zero pair in the
estimated model, a direct comparison can be made between
the models. The first pole of the estimated model is at a
lower frequency than that of the thermodynamic model, at
a frequency of 0.076 Hz compared to 0.11 Hz. The zero and
second pole are also at a lower frequency, which suggests that
the LP shaft response is actually different to that predicted by
the thermodynamic model.
Comparing the estimated models of the HP and LP shafts
it is seen that they share a close, but not identical, dominant
mode at a frequency of around 0.09 Hz. The results suggest
that the HP shaft dynamics are first order and the LP shaft
dynamics second order. The additional pole-zero pairs are
too slow to be associated with these shaft dynamics and are
probably modeling a heat soakage effect.
Such effects become prominent during large transient ma-
neuvers of an engine, and while the tests were carried out
around a fixed operating point, there may have been sufficient
variation of the engine operation during the tests to excite some
heat transfer dynamics. It is possible that the low-frequency
modes are modeling one of the faster heat-soakage effects,
such as blade expansion. Blade expansion time constants of 5 s
were quoted by Hennecke and Trappman [21] and blade and
casing time constants of 2 and 10 s, respectively, by Pilidis
and Maccallum [22]. The estimated low-frequency modes have
time constants of between 3 and 10 s.
VIII. CONCLUSIONS
The frequency-domain identification of the fuel flow to shaft
speed dynamics of a twin-shaft gas turbine has been studied,
with the aim of validating thermodynamic engine models. This
work was motivated by the problems previously encountered
when fitting discrete-time models to turbine data. These prob-
lems are caused by the need to use the measured fuel flow
in the estimation in order to exclude the fuel feed dynamics.
This can result in time-domain models with no continuous
counterparts, thus precluding the physical interpretation of
their parameters.
The results presented in this paper clearly show that one
solution is to use frequency-domain techniques, employing
multisines as test signals. Such signals can be designed to
concentrate their whole power within the system bandwidth.
A sufficiently high-reconstruction frequency can then be used,
so that the fuel feed system filters out the reconstruction
components. This overcomes the problems caused by the lack
of AA filters in the measurement setup. The flexibility of
multisine signals was illustrated by the three signal designs
applied to the gas turbine.
The tests revealed that the influence of nonlinearities was
smaller than expected across the linearization range of the
model. They also revealed that the noise on the input and
output signals was highly correlated at low frequencies. High-
quality models of each shaft were estimated and their fit to
the estimated frequency response was illustrated. The pure
time delay was included as a parameter for estimation and
662 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998
(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 10. Amplitude response of LP shaft model (solid) and FRF (crosses):
for model orders (a) 0/1, (b) 1/2, and (c) 2/3.
the results were close to those obtained on other engines of
a similar type.
The estimated models show the HP shaft dynamics to be
predominantly first order and those of the LP shaft to be second
order. However, low-frequency effects were detected on both
shafts which could be modeled by the addition of a further
pole-zero pair. The time constants of these additional pole-
zero pairs suggest that they may be modeling thermal effects,
which were not incorporated in the original thermodynamic
models. Further work needs to be conducted in order to study
these effects in more detail, using test signals with a lower
fundamental frequency.
This work illustrates the potential of frequency-domain
techniques for modeling industrial systems, where a physical
interpretation of the model parameters is to be made. This is
particularly true if the input signal has to be measured, due to
the adverse effects of the input actuator dynamics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the staff at Rolls Royce
plc and the U.K. Defense Evaluation and Research Agency at
Pyestock.
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