Design and analysis of a nonlinear controller for a hypersonic wind tunnel

Hypersonic wind tunnel system facilitates the study of aerodynamic forces on space vehicles by passing a stream of velocity controlled air over them. In the present work, a backstepping controller for the settling chamber pressure of a continuous hypersonic wind tunnel system using an appropriate control logic is proposed. This controller is designed by selecting a suitable lyapunov function. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, numerical simulations are performed and the results demonstrate that the designed controller can achieve the settling chamber pressure with reduction in settling time and peak overshoot when compared with the existing linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller.