Automation of aircraft engine fuel controls tests: an industrial case study involving PID control of a nozzle emulator

Abstract

The test of fuel control systems used on civil aircraft engines is performed with a network of distributed and, by design, isolated systems. The co-ordination of these test systems is performed manually by human operators in order to verify the airworthiness of a fuel control system throughout the products' lifecycle. The main objective of this study is the automation of an existing network of systems for fuel control tests. The aspect of automation that is considered in this paper is the control of the engine nozzle emulator which is critical to determine the airworthiness of repaired fuel control systems. This system is realized using a model following PID controller design approach. The results from simulation studies and a hardware-in-the-loop test are presented. These demonstrate that this PID control structure provides the necessary level of accuracy and robustness for this engineering process.