Increasing fuel thermal management system capability via objective function design

The drive to extract greater capability from increasingly complex and constrained energy systems has led to a need for systematically specifying and synthesizing desirable control strategies. The heuristic control design scales poorly with system complexity, and there is a lack of connection to quantifiable and verifiable requirements. Similarly, objective functions used in optimal control often use generic quadratic objective functions instead of objective functions inspired by the systems' fundamental properties. As a result, this can create a large tuning problem involving the penalties for many states and inputs. This paper investigates objective functions inspired by thermodynamics as a starting point for control design of an aircraft's fuel thermal management system.