Application of Two degree-of-freedom generalized predictive control to temperature control experiment of an aluminum plate

This paper explores an application of two degree-of-freedom generalized predictive control (GPC) to temperature control of an aluminum plate. Two degree-of-freedom GPC has the feature that its controller reveals an effect of integral compensation only if there is modeling error or disturbance. Therefore performance degradation due to an integral compensation, such as excessive control effort or slow response, can be expected to avoid. In this paper, this feature is defined as two degree-of-freedom system because the characteristics of output response with and without modeling error and disturbance can be designed independently, that is, on one hand the characteristic of output response without modeling error and disturbance is designed by minimization of objective function which includes control input and tracking error, on the other hand the characteristic of output response with modeling error and disturbance is designed by a gain of integral compensator. In order to verify the validity of proposed method, this paper explores numerical simulation and experiment for an aluminum plate thermal process with proposed method.