An Approach to Simultaneous Topology, Parametric, and Feedback Control Co-design: Applications to Conservation-Based Energy Systems

Energy systems are ubiquitous in modern society and optimizing these systems is becoming increasingly relevant to address current societal challenges such as climate change. With mobile systems, such as automobiles, aircraft, etc., contributing to nearly 30% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, there has been an increasing trend in vehicle electrification. Given the novelty, complexity, and strict performance requirements for these vehicles, there has been interest in using control co-design techniques to simultaneously design both the vehicle and its feedback controller. This paper focuses on the development of a novel framework for energy systems where architecture, sizing, and feedback control design optimization can be conducted simultaneously. The design techniques are used to generate mission-specific thermal management system designs for an electrified aircraft. By leveraging the novel co-design framework, it is demonstrated that a distance-sorted search algorithm could identify optimal systems design with ∼90% less system evaluations than a conventional enumerative search.