Adaptive Control of Active Balancing Systems for Speed-Varying Rotors Using Feedforward Gain Adaptation Technique

This paper presents a new adaptive control method for active balancing of speed-varying rotors. It is developed based on the feedforward gain adaptation problem, which is a classical technique in the continuous-time adaptive control area. The condition for using this technique is the need for strictly positive realness of the transfer function. In this research, the technique is re-examined and modified to be appropriate for the balancing problem. It is also shown that the rotor dynamics of single-plane balancing problem can easily be converted to a strictly positive real transfer function and that, consequently, the feedfoward gain adaptation technique can be applied. This paper demonstrates that the developed method can be applied to a simple Jeffcott rotor and can also be extended to the single-plane balancing problem of general flexible rotor. Simulation studies show that the new method works well as expected.