Advanced torque control for an engine bench system

An engine bench is a two-mass-spring system consisting of a dynamo and an engine connected by a shaft. The shaft has a property of nonlinear spring, and the two-mass-spring system is subject to periodic disturbance stemming from the combustion of engine. This paper focuses on the case where the resonance frequency and disturbance frequency overlap. In such case, the disturbance torque is amplified and the shaft has a danger of rupture. We propose a robust control method for this system. An H
_∞
controller is designed and its effectiveness is verified through analysis of the frequency response of closed loop system and time-domain simulations.