Middle East Technical University AE582

Fall 2010

Department of Aerospace Engineering Dr. Ali Trker Kutay

Homework #1
Given: Wednesday, 20/10/2010 Due: Monday, 01/11/2009 by 12 pm 1. A new graduate research assistant working in the controls lab is given an assignment to design and build a controls experiment for undergraduate controls courses. The experiment is to control the position of a mass attached to a wall with a spring and damper, similar to the example studied in the class. A schematic of the setup is shown below. mass in kg position in m position of the control cart in m linear spring constant in N/m damping coefficient in Ns/m The mass is to slide along rails with negligible friction. Different from the example in the class, instead of applying a force directly to the mass, the mass is pulled through a second spring that has the same stiffness as the first one. The other end of the second control spring is attached to another cart that slides along the same rail. The position of the control cart is directly controlled with a servo motor and is the control input for the experiment. The student writes the transfer function for the experiment as (1) and designs the following PID controller: (2) The block diagram for his design is given below. reference mass position position of the mass control input (control cart position)

Controller

Plant

He performs some frequency domain analysis by using the loop transfer function and concludes that the system has infinite gain margin, meaning he can pick as large as he wants and the closed-loop system will still be stable. He turns in his design with the following parameters:
m = 0.1; K = 2; B = 0.15; % PID controller gains Kp = 5; Kd = 2; Ki = 1; Ka = 50;

a) (1 point) Examine the closed-loop stability of his design by making a Nyquist plot of using your code. You can use the frequency vector w = logspace(-1.5,5,1000)'.

Middle East Technical University AE582

Fall 2010

Department of Aerospace Engineering Dr. Ali Trker Kutay

Determine the gain and phase margins graphically from your Nyquist plot and verify them with the ones you get from the Matlab command margin(L). Is the student correct? b) (1 point) Make a Simulik diagram for the above design by using a single transfer function block for instead of having two transfer function blocks for and separately as shown in the block diagram above. Simulate the system for 0.1 seconds for a step reference command of . Find the time it takes for the mass to reach m (you can read this from the plot). Can you use separate blocks for and ? Why? c) (2 point) The student attempted to build the experiment setup and quickly discovered that the controller he designed in (2) is not realizable. His advisor recommended implementing his controller as follows: (3) Modify the Simulink file you made in part b) to replace the controller with and this time put and separately. Simulate the system with seconds for the same case in part b) and compare the responses. Find the largest value of so that the overshoot remains below 5%. You can find this by trial and error from the simulation. d) (2 points) Another aspect that is critical for implementing the experiment setup mechanically is the servo mechanism used to drive the control spring. We can introduce the servo mechanism as an additional block as follows:

Controller

Servo

Plant

where is the commanded cart position and is the actual position of the cart driven by the servo. The student assumed an ideal servo mechanism. In other words he assumed that , or, the position of the cart can be controlled precisely without any errors or delays. In reality any servo mechanism has some dynamics. Assume that a typical servo that can be used for this experiment setup has second order dynamics as

where and are the natural frequency and damping ratio. The best servo the student can find for his experiment has rad/s and . Make a Nyquist plot for the system that will actually be implemented ( ) and determine if the system will be stable for the you found in part c) and the best servo that is available. Find the gain and phase margins. You can read them from the Nyquist plot, or use the margin command directly. e) (2 point) From the gain margin you found in part d) compute how much the student needs to change the gain to make the experiment stable (keeping , , and fixed). You are only looking for a stable response, do not worry about how the response looks like at this point. Plot the step response for and compare it with the responses you obtained in parts b) and c) (with the that gives less than 5% overshoot). f) (2 point) Find a value for (keeping , , and fixed) that gives less than 5% overshoot. Plot the step response for in the same figure with the step responses from b), c), and e). Find the time it takes for the new controller for the implementable experiment to reach m. Compare this value with the one you found in part b) for the ideal case.