Adaptive control of a slotless PM linear DC actuator

Linear actuators offer some advantages in respect of rotating machines coupled with mechanical converters in many applications requiring linear motion. For such reason a novel slotless PM linear DC motor has been designed and realised. Since often the drive dynamics is not well identified and/or it is subject to unknown payloads and/or parameters variations, adaptive control strategies could be used to overcome these problems. In this paper after a description of the mathematical model of the actuator, which can be utilised even with stroke length much higher than slider length, and of the adopted model reference adaptive control algorithm, the performance of the actuator under speed control in presence of some typical disturbances are evaluated and discussed. Finally, some shortcomings regarding the proposed system and its future developments are reported