National Science Foundation Grant Awarded to Develop New Theories for Aircrafts

Tennessee State University has been awarded a $149,238 grant from the National Science Foundation to research general theory in control systems design that may improve a wide range of control systems such as aircraft auto-piloting and nuclear reactor control.

Led by Lee-Hyun Keel, professor of electrical engineering and researcher in the Center of Excellence for Information Systems, the research goal is to impact control applications ranging from chemical processes, manufacturing systems, disk drives, missile and aircraft control, internet congestion control and biological control systems including genetic networks.

"We propose to develop new fundamental theory and effective design methodologies to address practically important issues which present theory cannot handle,” said Keel.

He explained that the proposed research is a very realistic engineering problem that remains open despite significant progress in computer-aided design. “In many engineering applications, system models are scarcely available and very few effective techniques exist for the design of simple controllers. The preliminary results noted in this research look promising,” he said.

Keel will lead efforts in overcoming several outstanding challenges of developing control design methodologies which use only measured data and attempt to regulate physical quantities such as position, velocity, temperature, pressure and flow-rate in control systems.

The research is a collaborative effort between Texas A & M University and Tennessee State University.