Relocated internal model control based cascade control strategy for stable and unstable systems with delay

Abstract

To control unstable and stable plants a new series cascade control structure (SCCS) is proposed. The proposed SCCS incorporates two or three controllers (setpoint tracking controller, secondary disturbance rejection controller and stabilising controller for only unstable plants). Internal model control scheme (IMCS) augmented with integration of square error (ISE) minimisation along with robustness considerations are applied to design the secondary loop disturbance rejection controller. In contrast, relocated IMCS augmented with ISE minimisation is applied for the outer loop or setpoint tracking controller. Routh Hurwitz stability criteria and maximum sensitivity considerations are used to design the proportional-derivative (PD) controller, which stabilises the unstable plant. It is important to note that the suggested SCCS only needs four controller parameters to be tuned, which is less than the recently reported techniques. Robust stability analysis of the proposed SCCS is performed in the presence of uncertainty. The simulation results depict that the suggested approach imparts pre-eminent improvement in closed-loop performance such as faster setpoint tracking and better disturbance rejection for nominal and perturbed plants.