Evolving analog controllers for correcting thermoacoustic instability in real hardware

Previous research demonstrated that Evolvable Hardware (EH) techniques can be employed to suppress Thermoacoustic (TA) instability in a computer simulated combustion chamber. Though that work established basic feasibility, there were still significant questions concerning whether those techniques would function in the real world. This paper presents the results of the next incremental step between controlling in pure simulation and controlling a real combustion chamber. In it, we will examine issues involved with using EH methods to learn to control a hardware analog circuit model of a combustion chamber. In so doing, we establish that the basic methods work when interfaced to real hardware and uncover some interesting, potentially critical, differences between simulation and real environments. We will also establish that both the EA methods and the underlying reconfigurable hardware can be expected to learn effectively in noisy control environments and that they are well-suited for upcoming use in a live engine.