"Career & Collaboration opportunities in Aerospace, Building and Power System Controls at UTRC"

United Technologies Corporation (UTC) is a diversified corporation serving three primary markets: Aerospace, buildings and power. Our businesses include Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky and Hamilton Sundstrand (aircraft engines, helicopters and aerospace power systems), Carrier, Otis and UTC Fire & Security (HVAC systems, elevators and escalators and building fire and security systems) and UTC Power (stationary and transportation fuel cell power plants). Our products require increasingly sophisticated dynamic modeling and control to achieve the levels of performance demanded by our customers. The most challenging control problems are highly multidisciplinary and require a collaborative, concurrent engineering approach. United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) has a history of meeting these challenges by assembling integrated teams drawing talent from our business units, UTRC and academic partners who come together to deliver innovative modeling and control solutions and technologies with both business and academic impact.

In this presentation, we will highlight two successful academic / industrial collaborations that exemplify this collaborative approach to controls engineering. The first involves product development of a 150kW stationary fuel cell power plant. This system includes a fuel processing system, fuel cell stack, thermal management system and electric power conditioning requiring expertise ranging from chemistry, mechanical and electrical engineering and thermal and electric loads. The transient requirements were demanding and called for precise and robust coordination of air and fuel flows. In a multi-year effort, UTRC and its partners developed physics-based, control-oriented dynamic models and used them for limits of performance analysis, control algorithm development, observer design, robustness analysis and software validation. The effort led to a successful prototype demonstration and also peer-reviewed conference and journal publications.

The second example involves control and estimation for safe and immune buildings. The business opportunity lies in integrating HVAC and security systems to increase energy efficiency and also improve security. In these problems, contaminant transport and the dynamics of people movement are coupled spatial-temporal, multi-scale, multi-physics problems. A multidisciplinary, academic / industrial team has been applying probabilistic methods such as Markov Learning methods to capture behaviors of people movement, together with dynamical system theory to obtain lower order representations of transport. The challenge lies in integrating the methodologies and exploiting advances in sensor technologies to develop a system useful for real-time estimation and closed loop control.

The session will present an overview of modeling and control at UTC, provide details for each of these projects, and close with a panel-style question and answer session.