CSS Webinar: On Discontinuous Observers: From Basic Properties to a Robust Fault Detection and Condition Monitoring Tool - Sarah Spurgeon

Date: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 11:00 am EST.

Register:  https://conferencecatalysts.webex.com/mw0306ld/mywebex/default.do?siteur...

Abstract

Historically the sliding mode technique developed as a robust control method being characterised by a suite of feedback control laws and a decision rule. The decision rule, termed the switching function, has as its input some measure of the current system behaviour and produces as an output the particular feedback controller which should be used at that instant in time.

The concept of sliding mode observers came later. These observers have unique properties, in that the ability to generate the so-called sliding motion on the error between the measured plant output and the output of the observer ensures that a sliding mode observer produces a set of state estimates that are precisely commensurate with the actual output of the
plant. It is also the case that analysis of the average value of the applied observer injection signal, the so-called equivalent injection signal,contains useful information about the mismatch between the model used to define the observer and the actual plant. These unique properties, coupled with the fact that the discontinuous injection signals which were perceived as problematic for many control applications have no disadvantages for software-based observer frameworks, have generated a ground swell of interest in sliding mode observer methods in recent years. This lecture presents an overview of sliding mode observer paradigms. The use of the equivalent injection signal in problems relating to fault detection and condition monitoring is demonstrated. A number of application specific results are also described.

Bio

Professor Sarah Spurgeon graduated in Mathematics from the University of York in 1985 and received her DPhil in Electronics from the same institution for a study of the design and assessment of non-linear control systems for aircraft in 1988. She was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Loughborough University of Technology from September 1988, and moved to the Department of Engineering, University of Leicester in April 1991. She was awarded a personal chair in April 2002 and has held a Visiting Professorship at the Ecole Centrale de Lille. She was appointed Head of the Department of Engineering at Leicester University in August 2005. In August 2008, she moved with her research team to take up a Chair in Control Engineering and head the School of Engineering and Digital Arts at
the University of Kent.

She is Chair of UKACC (UK Automatic Control Council) and a member of the IFAC Executive Publications Committee as well as Chair of the IEEE TC on Variable Structure and Sliding Mode Control. She is an Editor of the IMA Journal of Mathematical Control and Information, a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Systems Science, a member of the Editorial Board of the IET Journal on Control Theory and Applications and a Subject Editor for the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control. Sarah Spurgeon was awarded an IEEE Millenium medal in 2000 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2008 for 'fundamental contributions to the development of nonlinear control and estimation methods, from theoretical developments through to trials and subsequent industrial support of technological exploitation'. In 2010 she was awarded the Honeywell International Medal by the Institute of Measurement and Control for contributions in control and systems engineering. Her research interests are in the development of practically realisable nonlinear control strategies which yield robust performance in the presence of uncertainty, and the design of robust condition monitoring schemes.