Fractional-Order Controller design for Electrical Systems - A Study

Traditional and improved forms of Proportional+Integral+Derivative (PID) controllers are widely adopted in industries and laboratories to achieve finest outcomes during the reference tracking and disturbance rejection tasks. Better results can be achieved; (i) By choosing an appropriate controller structure based on the system under control, and (ii) By employing a suitable tuning procedure. If the above said checks are followed, then a better result can be achieved in offline and on online controllers. This research work aims to implement a Fractional Order I-PD (FOI-PD) structure for the benchmark Automatic-Voltage-Regulator (AVR) system and a Magnetic- Levitation (MegLev) system. Jaya-Algorithm (JA) is adopted to find the controller parameters. Initially, a traditional PID and I- PD structure are designed for the AVR model and its performance is analyzed for the reference tracking operation. Later, Fractional Order (FO) controllers, such as FOPID and FOI-PD are designed with retuning and tuning procedures. In this study, a relative analysis between the controllers is presented and its performances are evaluated with reference tracking operation. From this study, it is confirmed that, FOI-PD offers better controller performance compared to PID and FOPID.