The theory, development, and implementation of partitioned error control

Abstract

THE THEORY, DEVELOPMENT, AND IMPLEMENTATION OF PARTITIONED ERROR CONTROL Mark Leland Rutherford Dissertation under the direction of Professor Kenneth A. Debelak Partitioned Error Control (PEC) is a two-degree-of-freedom control structure which utilizes two tunable controllers and an internal model. This structure allows for independent design of controllers for servo and regulatory responses. The theory of PEC is developed and compared to other two-degree-of-freedom controllers, most notably internal model prefilters and two-degree-of-freedom H ‡ control. An analysis is presented which shows PEC performance in the presence of modeling error is equivalent to other techniques when they are designed on the same basis. A procedure is developed that uses information from the regulatory controller to aid in the design of the servo controller. Finally, case studies for the application of PEC on an inverted pendulum on a cart and a binary distillation column are presented. PEC is a viable alternative to existing techniques with greater breadth of application and greater flexibility in design choices, including tuning options.