An Approach to Robust Co-Design of Plant and Closed-Loop Controller.

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) techniques are often used to develop functional and reliable engineering systems. A key class of MDO problems is the control co-design problem wherein a plant and its control decisions are optimized together. However, little work has been done to investigate combined robust plant and robust closed-loop control design in the presence of statistical uncertainty. This work will address that gap by combining closed-loop co-design and reliability-based design optimization techniques. The utility of the proposed approach is demonstrated in the design of a thermal management system and its feedback PI controller. Reliable system designs are characterized by an increase in the system’s thermal capacitance and utilization of integral control to decrease the magnitude of peak temperatures.