Aircraft Turbofan Engine Health Estimation Using Constrained Kalman Filtering

Abstract

Kalman filters are often used to estimate the state variables of a dynamic system. However, in the application of Kalman filters some known signal information is often either ignored or dealt with heuristically. For instance, state variable constraints (which may be based on physical considerations) are often neglected because they do not fit easily into the structure of the Kalman filter. This paper develops an analytic method of incorporating state variable inequality constraints in the Kalman filter. The resultant filter is a combination of a standard Kalman filter and a quadratic programming problem. The incorporation of state variable constraints increases the computational effort of the filter but significantly improves its estimation accuracy. The improvement is proven theoretically and shown via simulation results obtained from application to a turbofan engine model. This model contains 16 state variables, 12 measurements, and 8 component health parameters. It is shown that the new algorithms provide improved performance in this example over unconstrained Kalman filtering.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA417944

Entities

People

  • Dan Simon
  • Donald L. Simon

Organizations

  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Computer Programming
  • Engine Components
  • Engineers
  • Estimators
  • Gas Turbines
  • Information Science
  • Kalman Filtering
  • Kalman Filters
  • Measurement
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Military Research
  • Monitoring
  • Turbines
  • Turbofan Engines

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Aerospace Engineering