Hardware-in-the-loop validation of advanced fuel thermal management control

As a result of increasing aircraft electrification and power density requirements, the development of advanced aircraft thermal management strategies has been identified as a critical research area to support next-generation platforms. To facilitate the validation and evaluation of thermal management strategies, this paper presents results from an experimental testbed that is representative of an aircraft fuel thermal management system. Validation of physics-based models with experimental data demonstrates the ability to accurately capture relevant system dynamics via first-principles modeling. These models can be used to represent the plant in simulation for rapid system analysis and control evaluation and can be embedded in model-based control designs. Two thermal management control approaches are experimentally applied on the testbed: one that is purely reactive, and one that uses knowledge of the vehicle mission to proactively prepare for upcoming disturbances. The proactive approach is applied both with exact knowledge of the upcoming mission loads and with errors in timing and magnitude between the predicted and true loads. Hardware-in-the-loop implementation of these control approaches demonstrates that the proactive approach exhibits superior performance in maintaining temperature constraints as compared to the reactive approach.