Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Seminar - Data-driven approach for the diagnosis of aerospace propulsion systems
Aerospace propulsion systems, including air-breathing engines, chemical rockets, and electric thrusters, require a diagnosis of dynamical status for safe and efficient operation. This seminar reviews the data-driven approaches for diagnosing aerospace propulsion systems, specifically focusing on the inverse problem (i.e., system identification) based methods for analyzing thermoacoustic instability in combustors. In particular, a self-sustained oscillator equation and its stochastic variant will be introduced as a phenomenological system model, which captures the key dynamics of the oscillatory dynamics in propulsion systems. We then describe the mathematical framework for extracting the unknown parameters of such an equation, including the linear/nonlinear parameters and the amplitude of the noise. We also introduce the physical insights that can be obtained from the computed parameters. An introduction to recent progress in system identification methods for aerospace applications regarding coupled models and a physics-informed neural network approach will be given at the end of the seminar.
Prof. Minwoo Lee is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Hanbat National University, South Korea. He is also serving as a consulting scholar at the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) Research Institute. Prof. Lee previously held the position of an Associate Research Engineer at the Space Technology Research Center at Satrec Initiative, Managing Consultant at LG CNS, and Assistant Professor at Sejong University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2020. His primary research interests are data-driven diagnosis and modeling of thermo-fluid systems, focusing on aerospace propulsion applications. His group is conducting research projects in collaboration with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, Agency for Defence Development, and Perigee Aerospace, Co. Ltd.