Comparing the Performance of Robust Controllers for Vibration Suppression in Long Rotor Systems

In this paper, the vibration control of the multivariable model of rotor bearing systems is considered for investigation. Some simply structured controllers that can suppress vibrational disturbances are tested for their robustness via the H∞ optimality criteria. Initially, intelligent optimisation techniques are used to minimize the H∞ mixed-sensitivity norm of the Linear Fractional Transformation (LFT) of the simple two-term PI controllers acting on the rotor system models. This results in some controllers that can suppress the vibration but with a slow oscillatory response. After this, an appropriate interpretation of the Bode plot singular values of the combined sensitivity and control effort matrix is used to explain the performance shortcomings of this controller. Moreover, the existing simply structured controllers in the literature exhibiting a faster performance are examined by using singular value plots. It is shown that when the maximum singular value of the control effort matrix drops below the 0 db line, the performance will be boosted. Finally, the H∞ controllers are designed by using the robust control toolbox in MATLAB. This resulted in rapid disturbance rejection, with the vibration amplitude diminishing to zero after 0.3 s due to double-step disturbances. However, these controllers in the frequency domain have an order of eight and may not be realizable to be implemented in practice. It is concluded that examining the Bode plot of the maximum singular value of the control effort matrix is a useful tool for evaluating performance in the frequency domain. However, designing robust controllers by toolboxes in the time domain can lead to superb performance with higher-order controllers.