Robust Nonlinear Control Design with Application to a Marine Cooling System

Abstract In this paper we consider design of control laws for a marine cooling system with flow dependent delays by use of principles from feedback linearization. To deal with model uncertainties and delay mismatches, a robust linear H ∞ controller is designed for the feedback linearized system. In this context, we apply a bilinear transformation to obtain a well-posed H ∞ problem. Robustness of performance for the resulting robust nonlinear control design is evaluated through a simulation example where a comparison is made to a linear control design.