A two-degree-of-freedom controller for a high-precision air temperature control system with multiple disturbances

The key equipment to prevent precision machinery such as lithography from being influenced by air temperature fluctuation is a high-precision air temperature control (ATC) system. The ATC system developed for a lithography immersion testing platform suffers from the difficulties of multiple disturbances, large inertia and time delay. However, seldom have control methods can solve these problems systematically. A two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) controller is proposed in this paper for this system, where model predictive control (MPC) is developed to overcome large inertia and time delay in the main control loop, and the measurable disturbance from the inlet air is compensated; based on the loop shaping approach, the controller in the disturbance rejection control loop is designed to attenuate the load disturbance; a Kalman filter is designed to reduce the influence of noise having no stable frequency characteristic. The experimental results show that the MPC controller and Kalman filter can effectively avoid the system oscillation, and the disturbance rejection control loop can significantly attenuate the load disturbance in the frequency range from 0.01 to 0.02 rad/s. Therefore, the 1σ precision is increased by 3.3 mK to 8.7 mK by the 2DOF controller when the system is influenced by the load disturbance with different fluctuation amplitudes.