Design of temperature control system toward thermal display with fast and precise response

Humans can perceive thermal sensation at most in hundreds of milliseconds after the contact with external objects. This point indicates that the temperature of thermal display must be controlled with the tracking time that is shorter than the perception time, in order to ensure the sufficient performance for rendering of thermal sensation. This research utilizes Peltier device as a thermal actuator of the system, and constructs the temperature control system by combining heat disturbance observer and local temperature feedback in order to enhance the response speed of the system. The experimental results show not only that the designed system can track the reference with sub-second settling time, but also that the system is well nominalized to simple second-order system even in the short settling time, which means that the transient response is easily adjusted.