Real-time simulation of a turbo-shaft engine's electronic control unit

Abstract

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is a comprehensive and repeatable manner for system-level testing of any control system. One of the first steps in an HIL simulation is to execute a preliminary real-time test where all parts of the control system are modeled numerically on separate personal computers (PC). In this paper, a real-time simulation of such preliminary real-time test has been conducted for an electronic control unit (ECU) of a gas turbine engine. The plant of the control system is a gas turbine model for a two-shaft turbo-shaft engine, loaded on an industrial personal computer. The turbine's controller is actually another computer on which ECU's software model is generated via software as well. ECU acts as a controller for the gas turbine and it ensures the operational reliability by limiting the angular speed, angular acceleration of the engine's shafts and other parameters within their allowable working range. Signal interactions between control system parts are created via data acquisition cards. Different gas turbine load functions are fed as inputs to the engine model and results are compared to those of a same control system, modeled completely on an individual PC in real time. The latter is otherwise known as software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation. The results show the acceptable functionality of the test setup.