MODULAR ELECTRONIC TURBOJET CONTROL SYSTEM BASED ON TPR

Abstract

Gas turbine engines are spread throughout the aviation industry due to their favourable power density and relative simplicity over reciprocating engines. In order to increase propulsive efficiency, the engine can be equipped with a fan that is delivering a large but slow airflow similarly to propellers. This group of gas turbine engines is called turbofan that is the most thoroughly utilized device for propulsion of large aircraft nowadays. Although single stream turbojet engines have less efficiency and therefore their role in commercial aviation has decreased, still they have some applications in the range of micro scale gas turbines. The control of the engine – let it be of any of the previously mentioned type – is inevitable for the proper use. Therefore accurate, fast, automatic and fault tolerant control systems are an important part of the powerplant. This article has the main goal to investigate the possibility of creating a control system for a turbojet engine based on the Turbofan Power Ratio (TPR) parameter independently of the current practice, where it is only an adjusting factor for a conventional rotor speed control. This paper focuses on the behaviour of the gas turbine with such a system implementing this novel approach and presents measurement results from ground test bench experiments, which has shown fair match between the thrust generated and TPR making it suitable for using it as a thrust parameter.