Robust temperature tracking and estimation for resistive heater circuit board with implementation

Resistive heating is an efficient method for temperature control in many applications that need robust control designs. Very few attempts have been reported in this direction to deal robustness issues like parametric variations, disturbances and uncertainties. Moreover, there are hardly any laboratory scaled setups available, that are of low cost and provide ease of implementation for such applications to test various algorithms. To that end, lately a resistive heater circuit board (RHCB) setup has become a benchmark setup for testing. For which, available control schemes largely use PID based schemes so far that are not robust. Besides, they employ numerical derivatives of measurements, resulting in the added noise. To circumvent these issues and to address the mentioned literature gap, this paper reports new experimental and simulation studies by developing new robust control and estimation designs for temperature tracking. We design via sliding mode algorithms, a sliding mode observer (SMO) and discrete-time sliding mode controller (DTSMC) for an uncertain system of RHCB. The proposed controller outperforms the existing PID schemes and tracks the temperature reference accurately, despite the uncertainties. Moreover, SMO robustly estimates the temperature measurements and provide accurate signal for the control purpose. In addition, this study also reports a first of its kind application of such DTSMC and SMO, for which the idea of using different temporal designs for each of them is employed and integrated together for the ease of implementation on RHCB. Thus, the novelty also lies in how to judicially stitch these approaches and showcase their efficacy through simulation and experimental validations.