Prognostics Aware Control Design for Extended Remaining Useful Life: Application to Liquid Propellant Reusable Rocket Engine

Abstract

As most of the safety critical industrial systems remain sensitive to functional degradation and operate under closed loop, it becomes imperative to take into account the state of health within the control design process. To that end, an effective assessment and extension of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of complex systems is a standing challenge that seeks novel solutions at the cross-over of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) domain as well as automatic control. This paper considers a dynamical system subjected to functional degradation presents a novel control design strategy. Wherein the assessment of state of health of the system is taken into account leading to effective prediction of the RUL as well as its extension. To that end, the degradation model is considered unknown but input-dependent. The control design is formulated as an optimization problem wherein a suitable comprise is reached between the performance and desired RUL of the system. The main contribution of the paper remains in proposal of set-point modulation based approach wherein the control input at a given present time stage is modulated in such way that futuristic health of the system over a long time horizon is extended whilst assuring acceptable performance. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is assessed in simulation using a numerical example as well as liquid propellant rocket engine case.

Keywords

• prognostics
• closed loop prognostics
• hybrid prognostics
• liquid propellant rocket engine
• remaining useful life