Model-Based Robust Control Design for Magnetostrictive Transducers Operating in Hysteretic and Nonlinear Regimes

This paper addresses the development of robust control designs for high-performance smart material transducers operating in nonlinear and hysteretic regimes. While developed in the context of a magnetostrictive transducer used for high-speed, high-accuracy milling, the resulting model-based control techniques can be directly extended to systems utilizing piezoceramic or shape memory alloy compounds due to the unified nature of models used to quantify hysteresis and nonlinearities inherent to all of these materials. When developing models and corresponding inverse filters or compensators, significant emphasis is placed on the utilization of the material's physics to provide the accuracy and efficiency required for real-time implementation of resulting model-based control designs. In the material models, this is achieved by combining energy analysis with stochastic homogenization techniques, whereas the efficiency of forward algorithms is combined with monotonicity properties of the material behavior to provide highly efficient inverse algorithms. These inverse filters are then incorporated in H
₂
and H
_infin
theory to provide robust control algorithms capable of providing high-accuracy tracking even though the actuators are operating in nonlinear and hysteretic regimes. Through numerical examples, it is illustrated that the robust designs incorporating inverse compensators can achieve the required tracking tolerance of 1-2 mum for the motivating milling application, whereas robust designs which treat the uncompensated hysteresis and nonlinearities as unmodeled disturbances cannot achieve design specifications