Embedded Multivalued Control for Ceramic Manufacturing

This paper presents the realization of a prototypal embedded system which implements a new control law characterized by a fixed and quantized control set. This effort is motivated by the observation that many industrial plants with high parametric uncertainties, both for constructive simplicity and/or in order to minimize the operation cost, are usually commanded with signals that can only assume a finite number of values. This paper proposes a new multivalued control algorithm which is robust with respect to disturbances and plant's uncertain parameters and consents the plant's output to practically track a given reference trajectory, with preassigned maximum values of the tracking error and its first derivative. Moreover, this paper deals with the digital realization of this new multivalued control law and the key issues associated with its microprocessor implementation. The efficiencies of the methodology and of the design procedure utilized for the realization of the embedded system are shown through a very interesting application: a temperature control system for a ceramic kiln.