Speed control of DC drives using MRAC technique

DC motors have been widely used in many industrial applications. Speed control is a common requirement in industrial drives in the presence of varying operating conditions i.e. load disturbance, parameter uncertainty, measurement noise etc. Conventional controllers with fixed parameters have not been successful for real time applications because of the drift in the plant operating conditions. Adaptive techniques are best suited for these situations. This paper presents a case study on speed control of dc drive using Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC). The fluctuation in load is assumed to be step disturbance on the plant, which causes the deviation from the desired speed. In the literature various adaptive control algorithms have been developed. A standard MRAC algorithm is applied and simulations have been carried out for different values and nature of load disturbances, parameter uncertainties and in the presence of output measurement noise. The simulation results reported in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller against varying operating conditions.