Control of Bifurcations and Routes to Chaos in Dynamical Systems

Abstract

This dissertation addresses issues in the control of nonlinear instabilities in high-performance engineering systems. Specifically, the author considers nonlinear control systems near the limits of their operating envelope. These are highly nonlinear situations occurring in the high-performance operation of a wide variety of systems. Such systems tend to exhibit nonlinear stabilities in terms of a jump to a new low-performance operating point, oscillatory behavior, chaotic behavior, or system collapse in the absence of appropriate control action. Such situations necessitate the study of controlling nonlinear phenomena such as bifurcations and chaos. A new approach to the control of chaotic dynamical systems is introduced, namely, control of routes to chaos. The theme is to design feedback control laws that ensure a sufficient degree of stability for a primary bifurcation in the routes to chaos. A thermal convection loop is used as a vehicle to illustrate the idea. Moreover, as the period doubling cascade is one of the most famous routes to chaos, the stabilization of period doubling bifurcations for general n-dimensional discrete-time nonlinear systems is investigated. The technique presented here affords considerable flexibility in terms of achievable behavior of the nonlinear system over a range of parameter values. One contribution is the modeling, analysis, and control of voltage collapse in electric power systems. A new mechanism of voltage collapse is suggested based on the framework of catastrophic bifurcations. Bifurcation control laws are designed to control these nonlinear phenomena at the inception of voltage collapse. The control laws are shown to result in improved performance of the system for a greater range of parameter values. Another important application considered is the stall phenomenon in axial flow compressors. A combination of bifurcation analysis and nonlinear control is used to study the dynamics and active control of rotating stall.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1993
Accession Number
ADA451731

Entities

People

  • Hua Wang

Organizations

  • University of Maryland

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Axial Flow
  • Axial Flow Compressors
  • Collapse
  • Compressors
  • Control Systems
  • Electric Power
  • Engineering
  • Information Operations
  • Nonlinear Systems
  • Performance Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Universities

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Control Systems Engineering.
  • Theoretical Analysis.
  • Wave Propagation and Nonlinear Chaotic Dynamics.