Control and State Estimation of the One-Phase Stefan Problem via Backstepping Design

This paper develops a control and estimation design for the one-phase Stefan problem. The Stefan problem represents a liquid-solid phase transition as time evolution of a temperature profile in a liquid-solid material and its moving interface. This physical process is mathematically formulated as a diffusion partial differential equation (PDE) evolving on a time-varying spatial domain described by an ordinary differential equation (ODE). The state-dependency of the moving interface makes the coupled PDE-ODE system a nonlinear and challenging problem. We propose a full-state feedback control law, an observer design, and the associated output-feedback control law via the backstepping method. The designed observer allows estimation of the temperature profile based on the available measurement of solid phase length. The associated output-feedback controller ensures the global exponential stability of the estimation errors, the H1- norm of the distributed temperature, and the moving interface to the desired setpoint under some explicitly given restrictions on the setpoint and observer gain. The exponential stability results are established considering Neumann and Dirichlet boundary actuations.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro

Robust stabilization of 2×22 \times 2 first-order hyperbolic PDEs with uncertain input delay

A backstepping-based compensator design is developed for a system of $2\times2$ first-order linear hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDE) in the presence of an uncertain long input delay at boundary. We introduce a transport PDE to represent the delayed input, which leads to three coupled first-order hyperbolic PDEs. A novel backstepping transformation, composed of two Volterra transformations and an affine Volterra transformation, is introduced for the predictive control design. The resulting kernel equations from the affine Volterra transformation are two coupled first-order PDEs and each with two boundary conditions, which brings challenges to the well-posedness analysis. We solve the challenge by using the method of characteristics and the successive approximation. To analyze the sensitivity of the closed-loop system to uncertain input delay, we introduce a neutral system which captures the control effect resulted from the delay uncertainty. It is proved that the proposed control is robust to small delay variations. Numerical examples illustrate the performance of the proposed compensator