Numerical simulation of a cabin ventilation subsystem in a space station oriented real-time system

Abstract

An environment control and life support system (ECLSS) is an important system in a space station. The ECLSS is a typical complex system, and the real-time simulation technology can help to accelerate its research process by using distributed hardware in a loop simulation system. An implicit fixed time step numerical integration method is recommended for a real-time simulation system with time-varying parameters. However, its computational efficiency is too low to satisfy the real-time data interaction, especially for the complex ECLSS system running on a PC cluster. The instability problem of an explicit method strongly limits its application in the ECLSS real-time simulation although it has a high computational efficiency. This paper proposes an improved numerical simulation method to overcome the instability problem based on the explicit Euler method. A temperature and humidity control subsystem (THCS) is firstly established, and its numerical stability is analyzed by using the eigenvalue estimation theory. Furthermore, an adaptive operator is proposed to avoid the potential instability problem. The stability and accuracy of the proposed method are investigated carefully. Simulation results show that this proposed method can provide a good way for some complex time-variant systems to run their real-time simulation on a PC cluster.