Global Stabilization of Triangular Systems with Time-Delayed Dynamic Input Perturbations

A control design approach is developed for a general class of uncertain strict-feedback-like nonlinear systems with dynamic uncertain input nonlinearities with time delays. The system structure considered in this paper includes a nominal uncertain strict-feedback-like subsystem, the input signal to which is generated by an uncertain nonlinear input unmodeled dynamics that is driven by the entire system state (including unmeasured state variables) and is also allowed to depend on time delayed versions of the system state variable and control input signals. The system also includes additive uncertain nonlinear functions, coupled nonlinear appended dynamics, and uncertain dynamic input nonlinearities with time-varying uncertain time delays. The proposed control design approach provides a globally stabilizing delay-independent robust adaptive output-feedback dynamic controller based on a dual dynamic high-gain scaling based structure.Comment: 2017 IEEE International Carpathian Control Conference (ICCC

Flow Stability of Patchy Vector Fields and Robust Feedback Stabilization

The paper is concerned with patchy vector fields, a class of discontinuous, piecewise smooth vector fields that were introduced in AB to study feedback stabilization problems. We prove the stability of the corresponding solution set w.r.t. a wide class of impulsive perturbations. These results yield the robusteness of patchy feedback controls in the presence of measurement errors and external disturbances.Comment: 22 page

Contact Line Instability and Pattern Selection in Thermally Driven Liquid Films

Liquids spreading over a solid substrate under the action of various forces are known to exhibit a long wavelength contact line instability. We use an example of thermally driven spreading on a horizontal surface to study how the stability of the flow can be altered, or patterns selected, using feedback control. We show that thermal perturbations of certain spatial structure imposed behind the contact line and proportional to the deviation of the contact line from its mean position can completely suppress the instability. Due to the presence of mean flow and a spatially nonuniform nature of spreading liquid films the dynamics of disturbances is governed by a nonnormal evolution operator, opening up a possibility of transient amplification and nonlinear instabilities. We show that in the case of thermal driving the nonnormality can be significant, especially for small wavenumber disturbances, and trace the origin of transient amplification to a close alignment of a large group of eigenfunctions of the evolution operator. However, for values of noise likely to occur in experiments we find that the transient amplification is not sufficiently strong to either change the predictions of the linear stability analysis or invalidate the proposed control approach.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure