Control of flexible structures governed by the wave equation

A new method of noncollocated controller design for flexible structures, governed by the wave equation, is proposed. The first step is deriving the transfer function of the system and noticing that it contains dead time, which represents the delay between actuator excitation and noncollocated sensor measurement. The controller design consists of two stages. In the first one, an inner collocated rate loop is closed in order to improve system damping. The optimal rate gain is obtained by investigating the poles of the full order transfer function. In the second step an outer noncollocated loop is designed to achieve high performance characteristics. At this stage an observer-predictor control scheme for compensating the response delay is applied