A design method of a performance-adaptive control system for a weigh feeder

This study discusses a design method for controlling a weigh feeder which has been employed to dispense material at a specified rate. In this study, a proportional-integral (PI) control law is designed based on a generalized minimum variance control (GMVC) law. The control performance of the designed control system is evaluated using a minimum variance index. Based on the evaluated control performance, one of the design parameters in GMVC is automatically updated such that the control performance is enhanced. In the proposed method, unknown plant parameters are estimated, and the GMVC-based PI control law is adaptively updated using the estimated plant parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through both a numerical example and an experiment.