Rapid Prototyping Real-Time Simulation Platform for Digital Electronic Engine Control

A real-time simulation approach with rapid prototyping for digital electronic engine control (DEEC) is proposed, and an ECU-in-the-loop real-time simulation platform with this approach is developed. The software-hardware framework of this platform is mainly composed of MATLAB/RTW for rapid prototyping from aero-engine modeling to embedded implementation, VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) for hard real-time and product-level application, xPC Target for simulated aero-engine, and PC104 embedded computer for electronic control unit (ECU). Moreover, the turbofan engine component level model (CLM) is packaged into MATLAB/Simulink and runs on the xPC Target. According to a lot of experimental simulations and validations, the results show that this platform is feasible and effective. So a series of issues can be resolved basically during the simulation stage. Furthermore, this platform not only provides a real-time simulation platform for the turbofan engine but also takes a groundwork for a newly, completely HIL platform applied to aero-engine DEEC development and validation.