Robust State Feedback Control of Electric Heating Furnace Using a New Disturbance Observer

As one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second order system. The SMDO is newly designed to estimate the lumped disturbance, where the estimation error converges to zero asymptotically. The estimation of the disturbances is then used in the control law of the RSFC to reject the system's lumped disturbance. The analytical results demonstrate that the proposed method is asymptotically stable with guaranteeing the tracking error convergence to zero even in the presence of external disturbances. Finally, the comparative simulation study shows the effectiveness of proposed method for the temperature control tracking of the considered furnace application.