Influence of stochastic estimation on the control of subsonic cavity flow - A preliminary study

This work alms at understanding how the different elements involved in the feedback loop influence the overall control performance of a subsonic cavity flow based on reduced-order modeling. To this aim we compare preliminary and limited sets of experimental results obtained by modifying some relevant characteristics of the loop. Our results support the findings in the literature that use of quadratic stochastic estimation is preferable to the linear one for real-time update of the model parameters. They also seem to Indicate the merit of using more than one time sample of the pressure for performing the real-time update of the model through stochastic estimation. The effect of using two different sets of pressure signals for the stochastic estimation also corroborates previous findings indicating the need for optimizing the number and the placement of the sensors used in the feedback control loop. Finally we observed that the characteristics of the actuator can alter significantly the overall control effect by introducing in the feedback loop additional, undesirable frequency components that are not modeled and hence controlled. A compensator for the actuator is currently being designed that will alleviate this problem thus enabling a clearer understanding of the overall control technique.