Analog controller based on sliding mode control for piezoelectric actuators

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1228170 (Table of Contents)

Today, the digital implementation of the controllers is mainly preferred from reprogrammability point of view. Many important control problems can be effectively solved using a digital architecture in conjunction with analog-to-digital (ADC) and/or digital-to-analog conversion (DAC). Digital solutions offer two very attractive advantages: (1)-promise to shorten design cycles, and (2)-provide the freedom to reprogram the design in simple ways. This ease-of-change stands in sharp contrast to the great effort required to redesign a typical hard-wired analog implementation. However, depending on the complexity of the plant and the degrees of freedom (DOF) to be controlled, digital implementation of an algorithm may be demanding due to the high computational power requirement to run in real time. The necessity for the acquisition of the analog signals on the other hand requires ADC and DAC conversions that compel extra conditions on the system. Hence, multi-DOF systems may require either diminish in the systems operation frequency or additional hardware to run the algorithm in parallel for each DOF. This work aims to develop an analog motion controller for single input single output (SISO) plants of complex nature. As the control algorithm, Sliding Mode Control (SMC) like the well known robust nonlinear controller is selected as a design framework. Originally designed as a system motion for dynamic systems whose essential open-loop behavior can be sufficiently modeled with ordinary differential equations, Sliding Mode Control (SMC) is one of the effective nonlinear robust control approaches that provide system invariance to uncertainties once the sliding mode motion is enforced in the system. An important aspect of sliding mode is the discontinuous nature of the control action, which switches between two values to move the system motion on so-called “sliding mode” that exist in a manifold and therefore often referred as variable structure control (VSC). The resulting feedback system is called variable structure system (VSS). The position tracking of the piezoelectric actuators (PEA) is selected as the test bed for the designed system. Piezoelectricity, the ability of the material to become strained due to an electric field, gives the possibility to user those materials as actuator in sub-micrometer domain for a range of applications. Piezoelectric effect is a crystalline effect, and therefore, piezoelectric actuators do not suffer from “stick slip” effect mainly caused by the friction between elements of a mechanical system. This property theoretically offers an unlimited resolution, and therefore piezoelectric actuators are already used in many applications to provide sub-micrometer resolution. Still the achievable resolution in practice can be limited by a number of other factors such as the piezo control amplifier (electronic noise), sensor (resolution, noise and mounting precision) and control electronics (noise and sensitivity to EMI). As a result of this work, we are aiming an analog controller for SISO systems and by the use of this controller, improvement on the tracking performance for the plant we are studying and decrease on the possible computational load on digital controllers is targeted.