Design of a Partially Distributed Turbo-Shaft Engine Control System

Turbo-shaft engines are widely used in helicopters, power generators and to power vehicles on land and sea. The benefits of transitioning from the current centralized engine control architecture to distributed engine control architecture are well discussed in literature. The distributed engine control system will be subjected to various network faults like time delays and data loss, which may degrade the engine control system performance. In this paper, a brief overview of the current turboshaft engine control system architecture is presented along with one of the candidate distributed turbo-shaft engine control system architecture. A sufficient condition is presented to determine stability in presence of time delays. A controller is designed based on the stability condition and it is shown that the proposed distributed turbo-shaft engine control system is robust to both time delay and random data loss. A T700 linear engine model available in public literature is used to verify the proposed methodology.