Motivation: Designs of bladed disks with low stiffness of blades can exhibit nonlinear vibrations that are detrimental to mechanical integrity of the system. Control strategies can be developed to mitigate harmful vibrations with minimal control effort.
Objective: Design an optimal controller that minimizes control effort and find the optimal escape path out of an undesired vibration mode.
Results: Using the Optimal Control Theory as a building block, and circular arrays of coupled Duffing oscillator as a physics based model of the blades of turbomachinery, I developed an optimization algorithm to determine the optimal escape paths and optimal control effort out of undesired vibration modes. From these resulting paths, I was able to quantify the minimum energy barrier required to create a transition. Using Large Deviation Theory, I was also able to show these paths are also the most probable escape paths when the systems are influenced by weak noise. This work is currently under peer review for publication in Chaos Journal.
My Role: All work described in this section was designed, programmed, analyzed, and published by Lautaro Cilenti
