Development of Anti-windup Techniques for Cascade Control System

In this research, the anti-windup techniques for the cascade control system are newly developed. Cascade control system has an additional internal feedback control loop to reject disturbances better than the conventional control system. Remarkable difference between the conventional single-loop control system and the cascade control system is the interaction that the controller output saturation of the secondary control loop strongly affects the integral action of the primary control loop. In industry, local back calculation anti-windup method has been mainly used for each controller without considering the interaction between the two controllers. But it cannot eliminate the integral-windup of the primary controller originated from the saturation of the secondary controller output. To solve the problem, the two anti-windup techniques of the cascade conditional integration and the cascade back calculation are proposed in this research by extending the local anti-windup techniques for the single-loop control system to the cascade control system. Simulation confirmed that the proposed methods can effectively remove the integral windup of the primary controller caused by the saturation of the secondary controller output and show good control performances for various types of processes and controllers. If the reliability of the proposed methods is proved through the applications to real processes in the future, they would highly contribute to improving the control performances of the cascade control system in industry.