STABILITY MARGIN COMPUTATION FOR NONLINEAR SYSTEMS: A PARAMETRIC APPROACH
Nusret Tan1 and Derek P. Atherton2
1 Inonu University, Engineering Faculty, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 44069, Malatya, Turkey. ntan@inonu.edu.tr
2 University of Sussex, School of Eng. and Information Technology, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QT UK. d.p.atherton@sussex.ac.uk
This paper studies the existence of limit cycles in a control system which contains nonlinearities and parametric uncertainties. The existence of limit cycles in a control system with a separable nonlinearity can be predicted using the describing function. In this paper, some of the well-known results developed in the area of parametric robust control are used together with the describing function method to analyze the stability problem of uncertain nonlinear systems. Based on the segment lemma, a stability result for a control system with an uncertain nonlinear element and a fixed linear element is first derived. Then, a polynomial method and a graphical method are proposed to determine how much one can perturb the coefficients of the linear element without causing the nonlinear system to have a limit cycle. Examples are given to illustrate the method presented.
Keywords: Nonlinear control systems; Describing functions; Limit cycles; Uncertain dynamic systems; Robust stability; Parametric variation
Session slot T-We-M08: Stability and Stabilization/Area code 2c : Non-linear Systems

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