Adaptive superheat control of a refrigeration plant using backstepping

This paper proposes a novel method for superheat and capacity control of refrigeration systems. The new idea is to control the superheat by the compressor speed and capacity by the refrigerant flow. This gives a highly nonlinear transfer operator from compressor speed input to the superheat output. A new low order nonlinear model of the evaporator is developed and used in a backstepping design of an adaptive nonlinear controller. The stability of the proposed method is validated theoretically by Lyapunov analysis and experimental results shows the performance of the system for a wide range of operating points.