Title: Model reference fuzzy cascade controller: a novel method for attaining desired mass flow in a wind tunnel

Authors: S.B. Rini Jones; P. Poongodi; A. Immanuel Selvakumar

Addresses: Department of ECE, Lourdes Matha College of Science and Technology, Trivandrum, Kerala, India ' Department of ECE, PPG Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India ' Karunya University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Hypersonic wind tunnels can hit hypersonic speeds and is used to test newly designed space crafts, airplanes, etc. The prototype of the vehicle is made and it is tested in the wind tunnel. While performing the experiment the pressure in the settling chamber has to be maintained constant, to get the desired Mach number speed and mass flow rate. Here, a novel non-linear control method called model reference fuzzy cascade (MRFC) controller is proposed and simulated for hypersonic wind tunnels. It consists of a cascade controller along with model reference and fuzzy controllers. Fuzzy controller is used instead of other neural controllers, since it is easy to implement and train them. The performance of MRAC controller is analysed with that of model reference fuzzy adaptive PI (MRFA-PI) controller. The simulation results shows that the MRFC controller is performing well compared to MRFA-PI for this process in terms of settling time and IAE.

Keywords: hypersonic wind tunnels; model reference control; fuzzy control; cascade control; mass flow rate; controller design; hypersonic speeds; Mach number speed; nonlinear control; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2015.070296

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2015 Vol.7 No.4/5, pp.336 - 347

Received: 13 May 2013
Accepted: 13 Jul 2013

Published online: 02 Jul 2015 *

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