Design of a High-Velocity Extremum Controller

A new kind of extremum control system is described. The system has a single-input controlled process with input and output disturbances and an output lag. The equations of the system are designed in order to follow with a great efficiency the variations of the extremum. The control signal is mainly generated by multiplying the derivatives of the controlled process input and output. In order to eliminate the solution of the equations which corresponds to the system drift, two particular circuits were added. Computed and experimental results demonstrate that the theoretical model is realistic enough to be used as a design tool. For an output lag of 1 ms and a disturbance velocity of 1 percent per ms, the extremum controller measures the maximum with a time resolution of 0.5 ms and an error of 0.3 percent.