Design of Dynamic Quantizers for 2-DOF IMC and Its Application to the Temperature Control of a Heat Plate

It is well known that plants with dead-time are difficult to controll by using traditional control methods. For this, some controllers with dead-time have been proposed for the systems with dead-time, e.g. Internal Model Control (IMC) and the Smith-method. However, these controllers cause another problem, i.e. it would be difficult to realize the dead-time component in controller because of the memory limit of micro control unit (MCU). The sampling time has to be large in applications to the plant with large dead-time when each data size is sufficiently kept. Hence, a trade-off between the sampling time and the maximum quantization error exists by the memory limit. In this paper, a design method of dynamic quantizers is proposed for achieving small quantization error for control systems in MCU. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by numerical examples. Moreover, the proposed method is applied to a temperature control of a heat plate. Since the input-output relation of the temperature control system can be written with dead-time, 2-DOF IMC is introduced for this system. It is verified that the output with the proposed quantizer approximates the desired output under the memory limit.