Continuous dynamic sliding mode control of converter-fed DC motor system with high order mismatched disturbance compensation

The combination of DC-DC buck power converters with DC motors for generating the so-called smooth start of drives has many advantages in engineering practice. Achieving high performance of such systems is, however, limited by the influence of disturbances/uncertainties of multiple sources. Some of the disturbances are mismatched, which makes them even more difficult to handle. Furthermore, the relatively high order of system dynamics makes the control design challenging. In this paper, a control structure with continuous dynamic sliding mode controller with a finite-time disturbance observer is proposed to address these practical issues. First, a special state transformation is applied, aggregating the acting disturbances/uncertainties in a sole perturbing term of the system expressed in new coordinates. Then, the observer estimates in real time the information about the lumped disturbances based on already available input/output signals and the obtained estimated signals (and their high order time-derivatives) are used to construct a sliding surface. Finally, the sliding mode controller is applied to achieve high performance of the resultant plant dynamics and to robustify the governing scheme against modelling discrepancies. The stability of the closed-loop system is proved here using Lyapunov stability theory and the efficiency of the proposed control method is validated through a multi-criteria numerical simulation.