Stability and convergence analysis for different harmonic control algorithm implementations

Abstract

In many engineering systems there is a common requirement to isolate the supporting foundation from low frequency periodic machinery vibration sources. In such cases the vibration is mainly transmitted at the fundamental excitation frequency and its multiple harmonics. It is well known that passive approaches have poor performance at low frequencies and for this reason a number of active control technologies have been developed. For discrete frequencies disturbance rejection Harmonic Control (HC) techniques provide excellent performance. In the general case of variable speed engines or motors, the disturbance frequency changes with time, following the rotational speed of the engine or motor. For such applications, an important requirement for the control system is to converge to the optimal solution as rapidly as possible for all variations without altering the system's stability. For a variety of applications this may be difficult to achieve, especially when the disturbance frequency is close to a resonance peak and a small value of convergence gain is usually preferred to ensure closed-loop stability. This can lead to poor vibration isolation performance and long convergence times. In this paper, the performance of two recently developed HC algorithms are compared (in terms of both closed-loop stability and speed of convergence) in a vibration control application and for the case when the disturbance frequency is close to a resonant frequency. In earlier work it has been shown that both frequency domain HC algorithms can be represented by Linear Time Invariant (LTI) feedback compensators each designed to operate at the disturbance frequency. As a result, the convergence and stability analysis can be performed using the LTI representations with any suitable method from the LTI framework. For the example mentioned above, the speed of convergence provided by each algorithm is compared by determining the locations of the dominant closed-loop poles and stability analysis is performed using the open-loop frequency responses and the Nyquist criterion. The theoretical findings are validated through simulations and experimental analysis.