An Alternative Design for the Traditional Lag-Lead Compensator

Classical control methods are still in vogue because of their ability to guide us, rather intuitively, in achieving desired responses with appropriate tradeoffs. Nevertheless, there are some inherent limitations and difficulties. This article puts forward some of the questions that troubled us and proposes a new approach to the lead-lag compensation of single-input, single-output, linear time-invariant systems, the ones we were introduced to in our first course on control systems. The target specifications we have taken are meant for standard second-order systems. We show that both the transient and steady-state needs are met using the proposed nonconventional lag-lead compensator. The superiority of this new compensator model is reported in this article with some case studies as well as experimental results.