Fuzzy Damage Mitigating Control of Mechanical Structures

This paper presents the architecture and synthesis of a damage mitigating control system for mechanical structures where the objective is to achieve high performance with increased reliability, availability, component durability, and maintainability. The proposed control system has a two-tier structure. In the lower tier a linear sampled-data controller tracks a reference trajectory vector while the upper tier contains a fuzzy-logic-based damage controller which makes a trade-off between system performance and the damage in critical components. The synthesis procedure is demonstrated by simulation experiments on the model of a reusable rocket engine. The simulation results explore the feasibility of automatically regulating the damage/performance trade-off in a real-time setting.