Stabilizing control design for liquid propelled rocket engines

Overview & Synopsis

The recent development of reusable rocket launchers has led to new requirements for liquid propelled rocket engines as the reusable trajectory planning and landing of the engine stage leads to performing complex maneuvers. In this paper, a Port-Hamiltonian model is derived from the state space equations of a liquid propelled rocket engine. From this modeling, conditions are searched out to show the passivity of the system around a functioning point of the engine. This paper additionally proposes the use of contraction theory to build a suiting stabilizing controller for the system. The controller is illustrated with simulations.