Hardware implementation of Cryo-Pneumatic Engine Control Unit

Pressure is an important parameter which affects the performance of the cryogenic engine. This paper presents the hardware implementation of Cryo-Pneumatic Engine Control Unit (ECU). When the liquid hydrogen (LH2) or liquid oxygen (LOX) tank pressure exceeds a specified limit, catastrophic failure may occur and when below a specified limit, the normal working of the launch vehicle is interrupted. The pressures of the tanks are maintained within safety limits through the implementation of cryo-pnuemo hydraulic algorithms, namely venting algorithm and isolation algorithm. This paper presents the idea of reducing the computational complexity of the processor for implementation of the algorithms, by offloading the processor and putting the logic in an FPGA. This result in reduction of memory usage, processor complexity, clock rate, and communication channel congestion. This also provides more computational margin. The paper describes the implementation of ECU onto a Xilinx based Virtex 5 FPGA platform.