Design and Test of a Stress-Dependent Compensator for Magnetostrictive Actuators

Magnetostrictive transducers are employed for several purposes where, often, the applied mechanical stress strongly affects the device hysteretic behavior. This issue complicates the design of controllers where such variable has to be considered as an additional input. Nevertheless, a compensation scheme with two input variables can be defined and fruitfully utilized in a suitable invertibility region. Aim of this paper is to present a novel compensation algorithm able to take into account the applied mechanical stress. Numerical results compared with experimental data, over a magnetostrictive actuator, show that the proposed approach leads to lower compensation errors with respect to stress-independent, classical, compensators.