A new approach for direct discretization of fractional order operator in delta domain

Abstract

The fractional order system (FOS) comprises fractional order operator. In order to obtain the discretized version of the fractional order system, the first step is to discretize the fractional order operator, commonly expressed as s?m, 0 < m < 1. The fractional order operator can be used as fractional order differentiator or integrator, depending upon the values of . In general, there are two approaches for discretization of fractional order operator, one is indirect method of discretization and another is direct method of discretization. The direct discretization method capitalizes the method of formation of generating function where fractional order operator s?m is expressed as a function of Z in the shift operator parameterization and continued fraction expansion (CFE) method is then utilized to get the corresponding discrete domain rational transfer function. There is an inherent problem with this discretization method using shift operator parameterization (discrete Z-domain). At fast sampling time, the discretized version of the continuous time operator or system should resemble that of the continuous time counterpart if the sampling theorem is satisfied. At very high sampling rate, the shift operator parameterized system fails to provide meaningful information due to its numerical ill conditioning. To overcome this problem, Delta operator parameterization for discretization is considered in this paper, where at fast sampling rate, the continuous time results can be obtained from the discrete time experiments and therefore a unified framework can be developed to get the discrete time results and continuous time results hand to hand. In this paper a new generating function is proposed to discretize the fractional order operator using the Gauss-Legendre 2-point quadrature rule. Additionally, the function has been expanded using the CFE in order to obtain rational approximation of the fractional order operator. The detailed mathematical formulations along with the simulation results in MATLAB, with different fractional order systems are considered, in order to prove the newness of this formulation for discretization of the FOS in complex Delta domain.