Controller design for a thermoelastic structural experiment
Background:
As part of the ambitious DTEC - SeRANIS research project, a satellite for in-orbit verification experiments is being developed at UniBw, which will be launched into space in 2025. One experiment will be on high-precision structures (e.g. optical benches for holding spectrometer mirrors), which is being developed at the Institute of Lightweight Structures. One of the main task is to design and optimize a control algorithm for the thermoelastic structure. A spacecraft is typically subjected to environmental irradiations (Sun, deep space, Albedo...). This brings the structure to have huge difference of temperature while orbiting, that brings to structural failure and/or undesired structural behaviour. The purpose of the controller is to control the displacements of critical points, keeping them under specific limits.
Tasks:
During previous work, the structure architecture has been designed. Starting from this, the design and the optimization of the control algorithm will begin:
- Starting from the Full Order nonlinear Model, the fist task is to linearize and find a suitable way to reduce the order (with FEM and Matlab/Python).
- Test the reduced order model, to check if the results are comparable with the full order model ones.
- Set up the Open Loop model and analyse the dynamics.
- Design different type of controllers, such as PID, LQR and also by using the Kalman filter (Matlab/Python).
- Optimize the process, considering design variables like control parameters and boundary conditions of the overall problem (Matlab/Python).
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