A Backstepping-Based Temperature and Humidity Nonlinear Tracking Control Scheme for a Class of Air-Handling Units

In this paper, a direct tracking controller is proposed for air-handling units (AHUs), which can regulate temperature and humidity effectively. The backstepping method is used for the first time to design the controller of the AHUs, and the original nonlinear model is employed directly, which can omit linearization processes compared with linearization strategies, and retain and utilize the useful information of the model better than model-free schemes, such as proportion integration differentiation (PID) control, and so on. Simultaneously, without fuzzy logics, the potential calculation explosion is avoided. Finally, the effectiveness is certified by stability analysis. As shown in the simulation, energy can be used efficiently by the developed controller, and the control accuracies are higher than the PID and linearization control methods.