Nonlinear Control of Power Supply for an Arc Heater

This paper proposes a nonlinear control strategy for the power supply of an arc heater, the generator of the high level enthalpy to heat the air, which flows into the plasma wind tunnel. The control strategy consists of a nonlinear feed-back controller and a feed-forward controller to regulate the electric arc current. The nonlinear feed-back controller, cascading a special nonlinear function of error on the traditional PI regulator, counteracts possible disturbances in the loop. It is also robust against the load uncertainty. In addition, the controller is easy to be realized. The feed-forward controller guarantees the exact control in absence of the external disturbances. Simulation results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed control strategy