Innovative Concept for Robust Control of exhaust valves application

In this thesis project a robust control for an electronic throttle valve(ETV) is developed. The thesis is held in collaboration with the company Testing Technologies s.r.l. The designed controller is intended to be used for testing purposes by exploiting the testbench of the company, in particular the aim is to have a controller able to adapt to different valve models and so to be independent from the parameters of the valve itself in order to speed up the testing procedure and to avoid the re-characterization of the model for every valve. After an introduction and overview on the state-of- the-art, the mathematical model of the valve is presented. Then three types of controllers have been examined. Starting from the work previously done for the company, a controller based on Youla-Coucera parametrization and a Feedforward compensation is taken in exam, then a more performing and robust controller is designed based on Sliding Mode Control techniques. First developing a classical Sliding Mode controller(SMC) and then exploiting the Higher order Sliding modes theory(HOSM) to realize a Super Twisting Sliding Mode Controller(STSMC).The classical SMC is more robust with respect to the Youla-Coucera controller,but has still some dependence on the valve parameters in the computation of the sliding surface. Instead the STSMC configuration is independent from the parameters of the valve, and for the design only bounds on the second derivative of the sliding surface are needed, making it suitable for a trial and error procedure and for self tuning. The control algorithms are implemented in Simulink for simulation purposes, then an equivalent scheme on labview has to be developed to integrate the controller in the testbench. To conclude, the three controllers have been compared considering the performances and the intrinsic predisposition to be easily tuned and the independence on ETV parameters.