Composite Control Law for Nonlinear Systems With Mismatched Disturbances for a Ball-Ramp Dual-Clutch Transmission

The dual-clutch transmission (DCT) was developed to increase the transmission efficiency and the shift performance. However, in a DCT, due to uncertainty related to the actuator, the tie-up phenomenon can arise, in which two clutches engage together or the clutch torque control performance deteriorates. Especially, the actuator uncertainty increased when using a special mechanism to increase controllability and efficiency. Among them, the ball-ramp DCT (BR-DCT), which uses a self-energizing mechanism, can reduce the consumption of actuator energy while also reducing the tie-up effect. However, the nonlinearity of the actuator must be considered, such as friction between parts and change in friction coefficient. Among the methods by which this type of uncertainty is estimated, the nonlinear disturbance observer is most effective when used to estimate the unmodeled nonlinearity of an actuator and time-varying uncertainty. In order to execute disturbance rejection control to improve the performance of the shift controller using the estimated uncertainty, it is necessary to configure disturbance compensation input. However, because the BR-DCT powertrain includes mismatched disturbances and nonlinearity of the actuator, it is difficult to apply the existing methods on the composite control law to shift controller. Therefore, in this study, we propose a composite control law to guarantee integrated stability in nonlinear systems such as a BR-DCT powertrain. The proposed method was verified through a powertrain test bench equipped with a BR-DCT. Finally, the proposed composite control law was able to converge both the tracking error and the disturbance estimation error.