Control-Structure Integrated Design with Closed-Form Design Metrics Using Physical Programming

Abstract

The technological area of Control-Struc ture Integrated Design (CSID) has witnessed significant evolution over the past decade and a half. This paper builds on recent developments in the area of computational optimization, and on new analytical methods developed herein, to make three distinct but synergistic contributions. First, this paper explores the application of the Physical Programming optimization method to the CSID problem. Second, a new approach is developed for the closed-form evaluation of time-domain performance metrics for highorder systems (e.g., settling-time). Third, a method for design-variable-linking that uses splines is proposed and is shown to be computationally beneficial while also leading to more physically meaningful structural designs. The numerical results obtained for a controlled idealized rotating structure suggest that the analytical developments of this paper might have practical applicability