1. Introduction
With the characteristics of rapid response, high tracking precision, and simple structure, permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) has extensively utilized in various industry applications [
1,
2,
3]. However, the control performance of PMSM system may be inevitably influenced by time-varying disturbance and measurement noise. Generally, the total disturbance generated by load torque and parameter perturbation will cause aperiodic speed fluctuation, thereby affecting the anti-disturbance property of PMSM system [
4]. The measurement noise generated by position sensors may degrade the steady-state performance of PMSM drive. Hence, the research on disturbance and measurement noise suppression has drawn great attention recently [
5,
6,
7,
8,
9].
To improve the time-varying disturbance suppression property, many advanced control algorithms have been adopted to optimize the performance of PMSM drive system, such as backstepping control [
10], fuzzy control [
11], active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) [
12], and sliding mode control (SMC) [
13,
14,
15], etc. Owing to insensitivity to parameter mismatch and strong robustness against load torque, the SMC stands out from the aforementioned algorithms. Distinguished from the linear sliding surface used in conventional SMC, a terminal sliding mode (TSM) controller was proposed in [
16] to obtain rapid response and strong anti-disturbance property. With the benefit of nonlinear sliding surface, the speed tracking error can converge to origin in finite time.
Generally, a sufficiently large control gain should be chosen to suppress the time-varying and unknown disturbance [
17]. Consequently, a fixed and conservative control gain may cause undesired chattering phenomenon, thus damaging the system hardware. On the contrary, the small control gain may lead to the instability of PMSM system in some extreme cases, where the stable condition of SMC cannot be satisfied. In [
18], a neural adaptive TSM control method was constructed to automatically tune the control gain of conventional TSM. However, the utilization of neural network technique heavily depends on the computing power of hardware devices, which limits its large-scale industrial applications. A fuzzy logic controller was employed in [
19] to avoid serious chattering phenomenon generated by overestimated gain of TSM control algorithm. However, the formulation of fuzzy rules is based on the experience of previous parameter tuning, which brings great challenges to the reasonable selection of the control gain. With the development of control theory, a typical gain-increasing adaptive algorithm was proposed in [
20] to adjust the control gain as the disturbance increases. The aim of the above adaptive algorithm is to increase the control gain until the closed-loop system stabilizes, and then the control gain is fixed. Unfortunately, this kind of adaptive law lacks the ability to reduce the controller gain as the disturbance decreases. To address this tough issue, a novel adaptive algorithm was constructed in [
21] to online adjust the control gain with the change of disturbance. As the disturbance decreases, the gain will also decrease correspondingly. However, the size of convergence neighborhood depends on some priori knowledge about the upper bound of disturbance, which is unreasonable in the practical engineering system.
Even though several SMC strategies have shown significant success in suppressing time-varying disturbance, the problems of measurement noise and excessive control gain still restrict the control accuracy of PMSM drive system. In [
22], the widely used disturbance observer (DOB) was adopted to estimate and compensate the total disturbance, which alleviates the control gain of NTSM controller. Nevertheless, two significant drawbacks exist in the aforementioned control strategy. On one hand, conventional DOB can only guarantee the asymptotic convergence of the estimation error, which results in low estimation accuracy. On the other hand, conventional DOB is unable to estimate the system states, which result in the inability to suppress the measurement noise. In [
23], the high-order phase-locking loop observer (PLLO) was employed to estimate the actual motor speed and lumped disturbance simultaneously, which can suppress the measurement noise and improve the low-frequency disturbance rejection performance. Unfortunately, introducing the PLLO may deteriorate the stability of PMSM drive system. In [
24], two cascaded extended stated observer was utilized to filter out the measurement noise without sacrificing the robustness of the closed-loop system. However, complex control structure may increase the computational burden and parameter tuning workload.
This article presents a barrier function based adaptive nonsingular terminal sliding mode (ANTSM) algorithm combined with augmented recursive sliding mode observer (ARSMO) for PMSM speed regulation system. Firstly, utilizing the barrier function to adjust the control gain of NTSM in real time, the severe chattering generated by conservative control gain can be greatly mitigated. Secondly, considering the adverse effect of measurement noise generated by position sensors, a concise and effective ARSMO is adopted to estimate the motor speed signal. Finally, the superior advantages of the proposed PMSM speed loop control strategy are demonstrated by experimental results. The major contributions of this paper mainly include:
- (1)
A barrier function is exploited to adjust the control gain of the conventional NTSM controller, which is simpler and more reasonable than existing adaptive algorithms that can only ensure that the convergence region of the sliding variable is related to the upper bound of the lumped disturbance. Without requiring any priori information of time-varying disturbance, the proposed ANTSM controller can drive the speed error and maintain it in a predefined neighborhood of origin.
- (2)
By proving that the closed-loop system will not diverge to infinity before the observation error of the proposed ARSMO converges to zero, the stability of the entire closed-loop system is theoretically guaranteed. Meanwhile, according to the bode diagrams obtained by the frequency-sweep method, it can be seen from the frequency domain perspective that the proposed ARSMO has satisfactory measurement noise suppression capability.
3. Proposed Speed Loop Control Strategy
3.1. Barrier Function Based Adaptive NTSM Controller
By constructing an adaptive law to adjust the control gain of conventional NTSM algorithm, the ANTSM controller is constructed as
where
is the variable control gain.
The basic strategy of the proposed adaptive algorithm is to first increase the variable control gain
until
s reaches the region
at some time
. Then, the barrier function is adopted to adjust the variable control gain
in real time, which ensures that the tracking error remains within a predefined neighborhood of origin
. According to the above analysis, the adaptive algorithm is constructed as follows
where
and
are positive constants. The barrier function
is designed as
with
being a positive constant.
Meanwhile, the relationship between the sliding variable
s and the output of barrier function is shown in
Figure 1. Obviously, as the sliding variable
s increases within
, the output of barrier function tends to infinity. As a result, the anti-disturbance property of the proposed ANTSM controller can be enhanced by increasing the control gain. On the contrary, once the sliding variable
s decreases, the output of barrier function will decrease accordingly, thus alleviating the chattering phenomenon caused by large control gain.
Increasing the values of parameters and can reduce the time for sliding variable s to converge from the initial state to the region . Appropriate parameters and need to be chosen to avoid overshoot of the control gain with respect to the bound of total disturbance. The parameter is related to the minimum value of the barrier function. Increasing the value of can obviously optimize the disturbance rejection capacity of the PMSM drive system. However, an excessively large parameter may cause the controller gain calculated by barrier function to be conservative. The parameter determines the predefined region of the sliding variable. Decreasing the value of parameter will result in better disturbance rejection property and stronger robustness. However, excessively large control gain calculated by barrier function with small parameter may lead to undesired chattering phenomenon.
The sliding variable s will be shown to converge and remain in the region in this subsection. Since the function is monotonically increasing, the sliding variable will reach the region at some time by choosing appropriate parameters and .
Next, consider the case when
. In this case, the adaptive algorithm is reduced to
. Inspired by [
25], the following Lyapunov function is constructed as
Evaluating the derivative of
yields
To make the expression compact, define
Since
, an intermediate variable
is introduced to prove that
s will remain in the region
when
. The intermediate variable is designed as
It can be deduced from (
10) that
is monotonically increasing on
. When
, one has by (
14) that
. Hence,
and
are positive. Under this case, one obtains from (
12) and (
13) that
where
.
Obviously, Equation (
15) satisfies the finite-time stability criterion in [
16]. As a result, the sliding variable
s can finite-time converge to the region
, which is a subset of
.
3.2. Design of ARSMO
Due to the fact that the time-varying total disturbance and high-frequency measurement noise always exist in practical engineering, the ARSMO is utilized to estimate the total disturbance and suppress the measurement noise, which performs as the feed-forward compensation in the control design. Assuming that there exists a positive constant
such that
, then the ARSMO can be constructed as
where
is the augmented state of the motor speed
,
,
and
denote the estimation values of
,
and
, respectively. Besides,
,
,
are the positive observer gains and
L being a Lipschitz constant for total disturbance
. In particular, the positive observer gains can be selected as
,
, and
, respectively [
26].
Then, we will demonstrate that the actual motor speed and total disturbance can be estimated by ARSMO in finite time. First of all, setting
,
, and
, one has
and
According to (
17), it can be deduced that
Together with (
18) and (
19), it yields
With the help of (
19), one has
Hence, it can be deduced from (
21) that
which is understood in the Filippov sense. Combining (
17), (
20), and (
23) together, one has the following differential inclusion
According to the detailed theoretical analysis in [
27], the estimation error can converge to zero in finite time. On this basis, the proposed ANTSM+ARSMO controller can be given as
Meanwhile, the block diagram of the ANTSM+ARSMO controller is shown in
Figure 2.
In order to illustrate the benefits of the proposed ARSMO in suppressing the high-frequency measurement noise, a basic recursive sliding mode observer (RSMO) without the augmented structure is designed to compare with the ARSMO in frequency domain, which is structured as
Generally, the bode diagram of the observer is employed to analyze its frequency domain characteristics. Since the proposed ARSMO and basic RSMO have nonlinear terms, these transfer functions are difficult to obtain. Consequently, a unified frequency-sweep method is utilized to obtain the bode diagrams of ARSMO and RSMO.
Choosing
, the bode diagrams of ARSMO and RSMO are shown in
Figure 3. Obviously, the proposed ARSMO performs as a low-pass filter and has satisfactory high-frequency measurement noise suppression property. Let
be the open loop cutoff frequency of the ARSMO, we can find that there is almost no phenomenon of magnitude attenuation and phase lag when
. Furthermore, the magnitude curve of the ARSMO resembles a slope, and the phase decreases rapidly when
. Thus, the ARSMO is effective in suppressing high-frequency measurement noise. In addition, the magnitude curve of the ARSMO is below the magnitude curve of the RSMO. Thus, the measurement noise suppression performance of the proposed ARSMO is better than conventional RSMO.
3.3. Stability Analysis of Closed-Loop System
Utilizing the estimation values of motor speed and total disturbance, the proposed enhanced ANTSM controller can be given as
where
.
The finite time convergence of the ANTSM controller and ARSMO has been demonstrated previously. To prove the stability of the closed-loop system, it is only necessary to prove that the closed-loop system will not diverge to infinity within the time interval . Next, we will give the rigorous theoretical analysis.
Since
, we have
. With the help of
, the enhanced controller (
27) can be rewritten as
By a simple calculation, one has
Choose a Lyapunov function as
Differentiating the function
yields
Since
, one obtains
. Due to the fact that
and
can converge to zero in finite time
T,
and
are bounded during the time interval
. Meanwhile, the variable control gain
and
are bounded for
. Hence, there exists a positive constant
such that
When
, the speed tracking error
is obviously bounded. On the contrary, when
, one can obtain from (
32) that
where
. Then, it can be deduced from (
33) that
Consequently, the speed tracking error is bounded and does not diverge within the time interval .
According to (
6), one obtains
Due to the fact that parameter is a positive constant and , the sliding variable s is bounded and does not diverge for .
4. Experiment Results
In order to investigate the advantages of the proposed control scheme, a series of comparative experiments are conducted on the test platform based on dSPACE DS1202 in this subsection. The experimental setup is shown in
Figure 4, and the nominal parameters of the test motor are listed in
Table 1. The other identical motor is mechanically coupled with the test motor to generate the load torque. The dc-bus voltage is 150 V. The saturation limit of
q-axis reference current is 9 A. The field-oriented control method is employed to control the test motor, and the control period is 10 kHz. Decoupled PI regulators are employed in the current-loop to control
and
. Meanwhile, the well-known ADRC method is employed to compare with the proposed control scheme.
The value of parameter L in RSMO and ARSMO is selected as . The values of parameters and in NTSM and ANTSM controllers are chosen as and , respectively. The control gain of conventional NTSM controller is selected as , while the control gain of the proposed ANTSM controller is generated by the adaptive algorithm. The parameters of the adaptive law are chosen as , and .
To illustrate the superior performance of the proposed ANTSM+ARSMO control scheme, experiments are implemented among the ADRC controller, NTSM+RSMO controller, ANTSM+RSMO controller, and the proposed ANTSM+ARSMO controller. The corresponding experimental results are given in
Figure 5 and
Figure 6.
Figure 5 shows the disturbance rejection properties of these four control algorithms. The experimental results from top to bottom include the reference motor speed, actual motor speed,
q-axis current, and
A-phase current, respectively. It can be seen from
Figure 5a,b that the conventional ADRC method with linear terms and conventional NTSM controller with fixed control gain is insufficient to suppress the adverse effect of load torque variation. Due to the fact that the NTSM+RSMO controller adopts a sufficiently large control gain to suppress the time-varying total disturbance, the chattering phenomenon during the stable operation of the motor is larger than that under the ANTSM controller. According to the experimental results of
q-axis current, it can be concluded that the proposed ARSMO has better high-frequency measurement noise suppression performance compared to the conventional RSMO. The comparative results of the four controllers under load cariation are summarized in
Table 2.
Figure 6 demonstrates the tracking performance of these four control strategies. The experimental results from top to bottom include the reference motor speed, actual motor speed, speed tracking error, and
q-axis current, respectively. The reference motor speed signal is chosen as
. Owing to the utilization of barrier function to adjust the control gain online, the speed tracking error under the proposed ANTSM controller is significantly smaller than that of the conventional NTSM controller. In addition, the maximum speed tracking error under the proposed ANTSM+ARSMO controller is almost the same as that under ANTSM+RSMO controller. However, it can be clearly observed from the experimental results of
q-axis current, the control performance of the ANTSM+ARSMO control strategy is better than that of ANTSM+RSMO control algorithm. The comparative results of the four controllers under sinusoidal reference are summarized in
Table 3.
Figure 7 shows the robustness of these four control methods. The experimental results from top to bottom include the reference motor speed, actual motor speed, ratio of actual inertia to nominal inertia, and
q-axis current, respectively. Obviously, the conventional NTSM+RSMO control method has the worst robustness. The motor has severe oscillation phenomenon during operation, and the actual amplitude of the
q-axis reaches its limit. At the same time, the actual motor speed under the ANTSM+RSMO controller also has slight oscillation phenomenon. Overall, the proposed ANTSM+ARSMO control strategy has satisfactory robustness in the presence of inertia mismatch.
The experimental results of ANTSM+ARSMO control method under different values of parameter
are shown in
Figure 8 and
Figure 9. The values of parameter
are chosen as 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5, respectively. According to
Figure 8, it is clear that decreasing parameter
can diminish the speed drop under load torque variation. Since the value of parameter
is related to the range of speed tracking error, a smaller parameter
can improve the disturbance rejection performance of the PMSM system. Similarly, as shown in
Figure 9, decreasing the value of parameter
can reduce the motor speed tracking error under the sinusoidal reference speed signal. However, the change of parameter
has little effect on the current ripple. Overall, the variation of parameter
causes a important impact on the dynamic performance of the PMSM drive system. The comparative results of the proposed controller under different parameter
are summarized in
Table 4.
Figure 10 and
Figure 11 illustrate the performance of ANTSM+ARSMO control algorithm under different parameter
. The values of
are selected as 80, 160, and 240, respectively. According to the experimental results of actual motor speed in
Figure 10 and speed tracking error in
Figure 11, it is evident that increasing parameter
can diminish the speed drop under load torque variation and the speed tracking error under sinusoidal reference signal at the same time. Since the value of parameter
is related to the minimum value of control gain, increasing parameter
may cause the chattering phenomenon, which is reflected in the experimental results of the
q-axis current ripple. The comparative results of the proposed controller under different parameter
are summarized in
Table 5.