Full Envelope Multivariable Control of a Gas Turbine Engine

The problem of improving the performance of a gas turbine engine operating throughout the whole flight envelope in the presence of predominantly destructive dynamical interactions is addressed in this paper. The controller aimed for in this work is decentralized, thus making the system tolerant to soft and/or hard failures and allowing the tuning of every loop separately. The control strategy consists of static compensators to minimize the interaction between loops, diagonal lead/lag for performance enhancement and a diagonal prefilter for loop shaping. Even for this rather simple control strategy, a significant performance improvement over previous control schemes is obtained.