Fuel control of a ducted bluffbody flame

In this paper, we consider the problem of controlling the flame dynamics of a ducted, premixed, bluffbody flameholder stabilized flame. The flame dynamics arise due to (complicated) interaction between the fluid dynamics and the inherent kinematical flame motion. For control oriented flame modelling, we make the simplifying assumption of ignoring the vortical component of the fluid dynamics in the problem, but retain the effects due to burning and fuel actuation. The resulting reduced order model arises as a hyperbolic pde with a delay that depends upon the state. We use the reduced order model to define and study a fuel actuation based control problem of tracking the heat released due to flame motion against a prescribed reference signal. We validate the results of control using a detailed simulation of the physical problem.