Maintaining proper membrane humidity is crucial to ensure optimal operation of a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell system. A membrane humidifier using the fuel cell exhaust gas to humidify the dry air is studied in this paper. We first develop a thermodynamic model, which captures the crucial dynamic variables of the humidifier, including the pressure, flow rate, temperature, and relative ...

In advancing our prior work on a unified theory for pseudospectral (PS) optimal control, we present new results for PS methods over arbitrary grids. These results provide a way to compare performances among different PS methods and suggest guidelines to choose the proper grids and discretization approaches for solving optimal control problems. The new unified ideas reveal hidden properties of d...

xvi 1 Optimal Control Theory 1 1.

An optimal control problem on a special nilpotent4-dimensional Lie group is discussed and some of its dynamical and geometrical properties are pointed out.

Decentralized control and agent-based modeling techniques are employed to determine optimal spacecraft motion for formations having multifaceted objectives in complex dynamic regimes. Cooperative satellite “agents” share a common objective (high resolution imaging) and simultaneously pursue private goals (minimal fuel usage). An algorithm is developed based on dual decomposition. The solution f...

This survey article summarizes some ideas of the two principle procedures for solving optimal control problems governed by partial differential (algebraic) equations: the indirect method or first-optimize-then-discretize approach based on first-order necessary conditions, and the direct method or first-discretize-then-optimize approach based on non-linear programming software. The focus of this...

We consider a vibrating string that is fixed at one end with Neumann control action at the other end. We investigate the optimal control problem of steering this system from given initial data to rest, in time T , by minimizing an objective functional that is the convex sum of the L-norm of the control and of a boundary Neumann tracking term. We provide an explicit solution of this optimal cont...

This paper presents simple sufficient conditions under which optimal bunches in adverse-selection principal-agent problems can be characterized without using optimal control theory.