High performance torque controller design for electric load simulator

Electric load simulator (ELS) is an important equipment in hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation which exerts aerodynamic load to the actuation system according to the flight condition. Due to the inherent extraneous torque coupling by actuation system, the most important issue for ELS is how to eliminate the influence of extraneous torque. This paper presents a powerful model-based adaptive robust torque controller, which transfer the external disturbance elimination problem to performance-oriented problem under uncertainties and non-linearities. The backstepping design via adaptive robust control Lyapunov function is exploited to construct specific control law for ELS. Extensive comparative results indicate that the proposed controller is effective to achieve a guaranteed transient as well as final tracking accuracy in the presence of both parametric uncertainties and uncertain nonlinearities.