Pressure control of a pressure tank by generalized minimum-variance adaptive control.

Recently, adaptive control strategies have been developed theoretically. Meanwhile, rapid progress in micro processor techniques has enabled us to simulate complex and large-scale systems. We can see that unstable zeros may appear when a digital control system is designed for a continuous system. Clarke proposed a design for a self-tuning controller (STC) based on generalized minimum-variance adaptive control for such a system. However, this design does not guarantee that the output can track the reference signal. Therefore, we propose a new algorithm to improve its capability for tracking the output to the reference signal. In this paper, the STC algorithm is applied to the pressure control system. First, we show the generalized minimum-variance adaptive controller proposed by Clarke and an algorithm for improving the tracking property. Next, we construct a pressure control system and we show that the STC algorithm is more effective than the usual PID control algorithm. Finally, it is shown that pressure control by the proposed algorithm is more effective than Clarke's method in tracking the output to the reference signal.