Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Harmonic Control in Continuous Time

In this article, we revisit the concepts and tools of harmonic analysis and control and provide a rigorous mathematical answer to the following question: When does an harmonic control have a representative in the time domain? By representative we mean a control in the time domain that leads by sliding Fourier decomposition to exactly the same harmonic control. Harmonic controls that do not have such representatives lead to erroneous results in practice. The main results of this article are: A one-to-one correspondence between
ad hoc
functional spaces guaranteeing the existence of a representative, a strict equivalence between the Caratheorody solutions of a differential system and the solutions of the associated harmonic differential model, and as a consequence, a general harmonic framework for linear time periodic systems and bilinear affine systems. The proposed framework allows to design globally stabilizing harmonic control laws. We illustrate the proposed approach on a single-phase rectifier bridge. Through this example, we show how one can design stabilizing control laws that guarantee periodic disturbance rejection and low harmonic content.