Passivity-based Control of Surge and Rotating Stall in Axial Flow Compressors

Abstract

In this work, we address the stability of compression systems and the active control of performance limiting phenomena: surge and rotating stall. Despite considerable efforts to stabilize axial compressors at efficient operating points, preventing and suppressing rotating stall and surge are still challenging problems. Due to certain passivity properties of the widely used Moore and Greitzer model for axial compressors, a robust passivity-based control approach is applied here to tackle the problem. The main advantage of this approach is that robust stabilization and high performance control can be achieved by simple control laws and limited control efforts. Analytical developments and time-domain simulations demonstrate that the developed control laws can effectively damp out rotating stall and surge limit cycles by throttle and close-coupled valve actuations. The robust performance of the controller is validated in the presence of bounded mass flow and pressure disturbances, as well as model uncertainties.