Adaptive-Q control of vibration due to unknown disturbances in rotor/magnetic bearing systems

A method of adaptive control, termed adaptive-Q control, is applied to a rotor/magnetic bearing system. The method is based on the principle that a model based stabilising controller can be formed from a fixed state feedback controller together with a free parameter Q, which is any stable transfer function matrix. The problem of adapting Q online to minimise the sum squares vibration error is formulated and implemented in simulation using a recursive least squares algorithm. The results of the simulation study show that the method of control can be successfully applied to minimise the rotor vibration due to unknown disturbances. This is demonstrated for direct rotor forcing and base motion disturbances.