Computational Methods for Feedback Controllers for Aerodynamics Flow Applications

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research Phase I project sponsored by the Air Force involves a product development effort aimed at establishing systematic procedures for control-oriented model reduction from PDE descriptions of aerodynamic flow systems, the design of low-order feedback controllers using these procedures, and the implementation of these procedures in an industrial software environment compatible with existing control design tools. The basic work has already been established by research at the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB). Most flow control problems can be recast as suppression of some instability (upstream) that causes some undesirable phenomenon (flow or pressure oscillations) downstream. The innovative feature of the proposed methods is that they capture the essential dynamics, i.e., they are control-oriented. In Phase I, the developed techniques were applied to a flow control problem representative of aerospace problems that can be handled by most commercial finite element packages. In Phase II, technology developed at SC Solutions and UCSB will be made into a prototype software product under Matlab^®. The potential for wide-ranging commercial applications is tremendous since we are developing the first-ever commercially available flow control design software package.