Stability and Performance of a Control System with an Intelligent Limiter

All mechanical systems have saturation nonlinearity in actuators or in final control elements. When controllers have integral action, reset windup can cause instability as well as make the system performance unsatisfactory. In this study, an intelligent limiter which needs no tuning of parameters is tested with the PDF controller used for control of a second-order plant. This paper presents analysis of the stability of the system using the describing function method and the Nyquist Stability theorem. The improvement of system performance by the limiter is illustrated by computer simulations.