Adaptive Pressure Control Experiment: Controller Design and Implementation

In this paper, closed loop reference model adaptive controller is implemented for the pressure control of an industrial grade cold air test setup which is ubiquitously used to conduct experiments to test and validate the throttleable ducted rocket subsystems. The objective is to control the gas pressure of a closed chamber with two ports, one entrance and one discharge. Discharge port has a control valve to manipulate the throat area. It is demonstrated that closed-loop reference model adaptive control provides improved tracking performance compared to both constant gain proportional-plus integral controller and classical model reference adaptive controller, by suppressing the oscillations and overshoots observed for more demanding pressure commands.