Fractional Order Linear ADRC-Based Controller Design for Heat-Flow Experiment

Fractional order control (FOC) has received widespread attention in recent years due to its efficient tuning capacity, intuitive concept, and enough flexibility. Again, FOC are known to be robust with the open loop gain in particular. However, the design of FOC demands the knowledge of the model to be modified. But on the other hand, the linear active disturbance control (LADRC) technique is known to be model free controller. In order to achieve the better tracking performance even in uncertain operational conditions by responding timely against external disturbances, these two controllers (FOC and LADRC) are combined to propose a new fractional order LADRC to handle integer order system. Therefore, FOC-based LADRC for heat-flow experiment (HFE) is designed in this paper to track desired trajectories of heat flow. Bode’s ideal transfer function is considered as an orientation model to propose this new controller while using the concept of internal mode control. A better performance of fractional order linear active disturbance control (FO-LADRC) is shown for a very good disturbance rejection capability through simulation and experiments on a heat-flow system.