Aaron Cramer, Kentucky Utilities Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received a new award from the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research. The project will be funded in the amount of $358,976 and span three years.
Advances in shipboard power systems are creating new opportunities to apply energy to meet the mission needs of the warfighter, but the growing complexity of such systems is creating new challenges for the control systems that must govern them. Improvement in analysis and design techniques will improve resource utilization, allowing the system to operate more efficiently and/or with greater performance.
The proposed research seeks to advance the metric-based evaluation of control system performance by addressing three primary objectives:
- Evaluation of optimal-control-based system techniques
- Integration of control-based evaluation with other system metrics
- Assessment of control implementation opportunities
Contributions in these areas will immediately improve the capability of control system evaluation and will ultimately lead to new techniques for the development of control systems for complex, multi-mission systems.
The proposed analysis and design techniques can be used for electric warship power system control. The performance of candidate control system concepts can be analyzed, and these types of analyses can be used for requirements specification. The techniques can also be used to improve the design of such control systems, which may reduce the overall engineering cost associated with shipboard power system control. This effort will advance a systematic framework for evaluating the interaction of equipment sizing and placement, mission requirements, and control strategies, which will be necessary in order to field capable multi-mission platforms.