Minimax Controller Design for Combustion Instabilities

A robust feedback controller for combustion thermo-acoustic instabilities is presented in this paper. To address the issue of the system's parameter uncertainties, the minimax principles based controller is used. The minimax corresponds to finding the best controller for the worst parameter deviation. In other words, choosing controller parameters to minimize, and parameter deviation to maximize some quadratic performance metric. Using the minimax-based controller, a remarkable improvement in the control system's ability to handle parameter uncertainties is achieved when compared to the robustness of the regular control schemes such as LQR and LQG.