Performance Analysis of Robust Stable PID Controllers Using Dominant Pole Placement for SOPTD Process Models

TL;DR

This paper develops new analytical methods for designing robust stable PID controllers with dominant pole placement for SOPTD processes, considering delay approximations and stability regions through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It introduces analytical expressions for pole placement in SOPTD systems using Pade approximation and analyzes stability regions considering different non-dominant pole types.

Findings

Invariance of closed-loop performance with different Pade orders verified.

Stability regions depend on the nature of non-dominant poles.

Robust control performance assessed via extensive Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

This paper derives new formulations for designing dominant pole placement based proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers to handle second order processes with time delays (SOPTD). Previously, similar attempts have been made for pole placement in delay-free systems. The presence of the time delay term manifests itself as a higher order system with variable number of interlaced poles and zeros upon Pade approximation, which makes it difficult to achieve precise pole placement control. We here report the analytical expressions to constrain the closed loop dominant and non-dominant poles at the desired locations in the complex s-plane, using a third order Pade approximation for the delay term. However, invariance of the closed loop performance with different time delay approximation has also been verified using increasing order of Pade, representing a closed to reality higher order delay dynamics. The choice of the nature of non-dominant poles e.g. all being complex, real or a combination of them modifies the characteristic equation and influences the achievable stability regions. The effect of different types of non-dominant poles and the corresponding stability regions are obtained for nine test-bench processes indicating different levels of open-loop damping and lag to delay ratio. Next, we investigate which expression yields a wider stability region in the design parameter space by using Monte Carlo simulations while uniformly sampling a chosen design parameter space. Various time and frequency domain control performance parameters are investigated next, as well as their deviations with uncertain process parameters, using thousands of Monte Carlo simulations, around the robust stable solution for each of the nine test-bench processes.