CHAPTER 1
Review of Feedback Systems
Marc Thompson
Dr. Marc Thompson leads us to an appreciation of how the world has learned about FEEDBACK (negative) over the years, so we can understand how to do better feedback in our systems. /rap
Introduction and Some Early History of Feedback Control A feedback system is one that compares its output to a desired input and takes corrective action to force the output to follow the input. Arguably, the beginnings of automatic feedback control 1 can be traced back to the work of James Watt in the 1700s. Watt did lots of work on steam engines, and he adapted 2 a centrifugal governor to automatically control the speed of a steam engine. The governor comprised two rotating metal balls that would fl y out due to centrifugal force. The amount of “ fl y-out ” was then used to regulate the speed of the steam engine by adjusting a throttle. This was an example of proportional control. The steam engines of Watt’ s day worked well with the governor, but as steam engines became larger and better engineered, it was found that there could be stability problems in the engine speed. One of the problems was hunting , or an engine speed that would surge and decrease, apparently hunting for a stable operating point. This phenomenon was not well understood until the latter part of the 19th century, when James Maxwell 3 (yes, the same Maxwell famous for all those equations) developed the mathematics of the stability of the Watt governor using differential equations.
1 Others may argue that the origins of feedback control trace back to the water clocks and fl oat regulators of the ancients. See, e.g., Otto Mayr’s The Origins of Feedback Control , The MIT Press, 1970. 2 The centrifugal governor was invented by Thomas Mead c. 1787, for which he received British Patent #1628. 3 James C. Maxwell, “On Governors,” Proceedings of the Royal Society , 1867, pp. 270–283.
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Invention of the Negative Feedback Amplifi er We now jump forward to the 20th century. In the early days of the telephone, practical diffi culties were encountered in building a transcontinental telephone line. The fi rst transcontinental telephone system, built in 1914, used #8 copper wire weighing about 1000 pounds per mile. Loss due to the resistance of the wire was approximately 60dB. 4 Several vacuum tube amplifi ers were used to boost the amplitude. These amplifi ers have limited bandwidth and signifi cant nonlinear distortion. The effects of cascading amplifi ers ( Figure 1-1 ) resulted in intolerable amounts of signal distortion. Harold Black graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1921 and joined Bell Laboratory. At this time, a major task facing AT & T was the improvement of the telephone system and the problem of distortion in cascaded amplifi ers. In 1927, Black 5 was considering the problem of distortion in amplifi ers and came up with the idea of the negative feedback amplifi er (Figure 1-2 ) . “ Then came the morning of Tuesday, August 2, 1927, when the concept of the nega- tive feedback amplifier came to me in a flash while I was crossing the Hudson River on the Lackawanna Ferry, on the way to work. For more than 50 years I have pon- dered how and why the idea came, and I can’ t say any more today than I could that morning. All I know is that after several years of hard work on the problem, I sud- denly realized that if I fed the amplifier output back to the input, in reverse phase, and kept the device from oscillating (singing, as we called it then), I would have exactly what I wanted: a means of canceling out the distortion in the output. I opened my morning newspaper and on a page of The New York Times I sketched a simple diagram of a negative feedback amplifier plus the equations for the amplification with feedback. I signed the sketch, and 20 minutes later, when I reached the labora- tory at 463 West Street, it was witnessed, understood, and signed by the late Earl C. Bleassing. I envisioned this circuit as leading to extremely linear amplifiers (40 to 50 dB of negative feedback), but an important question is: How did I know I could avoid self-oscillations over very wide frequency bands when many people doubted such circuits would be stable? My confidence stemmed from work that I had done two years earlier on certain novel oscillator circuits and three years earlier in designing the terminal circuits, including the filters, and developing the mathematics for a carrier telephone system for short toll circuits.”
4 William McC. Siebert, Circuits, Signals and Systems , The MIT Press, 1986. 5 Harold Black, “Inventing the Negative Feedback Amplifi er,” IEEE Spectrum , December 1977, pp. 55–60. See also Harold Black’s U.S. Patent #2,102, 671, “Wave Translation System,” fi led April 22, 1932, and issued December 21, 1937, and Black’s early paper “Stabilized Feed-Back Amplifi ers,” Bell System Technical Journal , 1934.
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A typical closed-loop negative feedback system as is commonly implemented is shown in Figure 1-3 . The “ plant ” in this diagram might represent, for instance, the power stage in an audio amplifi er. A properly designed control system can maintain the output at a desired level in the face of external disturbances and uncertainties in the model of the plant. The goal of the feedback system is to force the output to track the input, perhaps with some gain and frequency-response shaping.
vi a1 a2 an vo
Figure 1-1: Amplifi er cascade.
v v e a v i o
v f f
(a)
GAIN FREQUENCY CHARACTERISTIC AS FUNCTION OF DEGENERATIVE 100 FEEDBACK 561 559 551 550 556 560 562 90 NO 555 552 568 R FEEDBACK R 80 Ro 2 565 564 557 KR Ro2 567 554 553 KR 70 OPERATING RANGE 558 o KR2 KR 60 o2 566 563 FEEDBACK 1 50 571 572 573 GAIN-DB f 40 GRID OF FIRST TUBE PLATE OF LAST TUBE 30 FEEDBACK 2 C G o L 20 V V1 V2 Ro E mV 10 102 2468 103 2 468 104 2468 105 FREQUENCY, CYCLES (b) Figure 1-2 : Classical single-input, single-output control loop, as envisioned by Black. (a) Block diagram form. (b) Excerpt from Black’ s U.S. patent #2,102,671, issued in 1937.
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Disturbance
Input Output Amplifier/ Comparator Plant Compensator
Feedback Element
Figure 1-3 : Typical feedback system showing functionality of individual blocks. In this confi guration, the output signal is fed back to the input, where it is compared with the desired input. The difference between the two signals is amplifi ed and applied to the plant input. In order to design a successful feedback system, several issues must be resolved: • First, how do you generate the model of the plant, given that many systems do not have well-defi ned transfer functions? • Once you have the model of the plant, how do you close the loop, resulting in a stable system with a desired gain and bandwidth? Control System Basics A classical feedback loop, as envisioned by Black, is shown in Figure 1-4 . Note that there is an external disturbance in this system, the voltage v d . In this system, a is the forward path gain and f is the feedback gain. The forward gain a and feedback factor f may have frequency dependence (and, hence, the plant should be denoted as a ( s )), but for notational simplicity we’ ll drop the Laplace variable s .
vd
ve v a v i o
v f f
Figure 1-4: Classical single-input, single-output control loop, with input voltage v i , output voltage v o , and external disturbance v d .
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Initially, let’ s set the disturbance v d to zero. The “ error ” term v e is the difference between the input and the fed-back portion of the output. We can solve for the transfer function with the result: vavoe [1-1] vvvei f vfv fo The closed-loop gain is (A closed-loop gain): v a A o [1-2] v af i 1 or: FORWARD GAIN A [1-3] LOOP TRANSMISSION 1 Note what happens in the limit of af 1:
1 A [1-4] f
This is the key to designing a successful feedback system; if you can guarantee that af 1 for the frequencies that you are interested in, then your closed-loop gain will not be dependent on the details of the plant gain a ( s ). This is very useful, since in some cases the feedback function f can be implemented with a simple resistive divider . . . which can be cheap and accurate.
Loop Transmission and Disturbance Rejection The term in the denominator of the gain equation is 1 af , where the term − af is called the loop transmission , or L.T . This term is the gain going around the whole feedback loop; you can fi nd the L.T. by doing a thought experiment: Cut the feedback loop in one place, inject a signal, and fi nd out what returns where you cut. The gain around the loop is the loop transmission. Now let’ s fi nd the gain from the disturbance input to the output: v 11 o [1-5] vafLT d 1..1 Note that if the loop transmission is large at frequencies of interest, then the output due to the disturbance will be small. The term (1 af ) is called the desensitivity of the system. Let’ s fi gure out the fractional change in closed-loop gain A due to a change in forward-path gain a .
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a(s)
1 f
log (v)
Figure 1-5 : Plot for estimating closed-loop transfer function graphically. The curve a ( s ) depicts the frequency dependence of the forward-path gain. The line 1/f is the inverse of the feedback gain, shown here for resistive feedback. The thick line indicates our estimate for closed-loop transfer function. For a ( s ) f 1 , the closed-loop gain is approximately 1/f . For a ( s ) f 1 , the closed-loop gain is approximately a (s ).
a A 1 af ⎛ ⎞⎛ ⎞ ⎛ ⎞ dA (1 af ) af ⎜ 1 ⎟⎜ 1 ⎟ A ⎜ 1 ⎟ = ⎜ ⎟⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ [1-6] da ()1 af2 ⎝⎜1 af⎠⎟⎝⎜1 af ⎠⎟ aaf⎝⎜1 + ⎠⎟ ⎛ ⎞ ) dA da ⎜ 1 ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ A aaf⎝⎜1 ⎠⎟
This result means that if af 1, then the fractional change in closed-loop gain (dA/A ) is much smaller than the fractional change in forward-path gain ( da/a ).
We can make a couple of approximations in the limit of large and small loop transmission. For large loop transmission (af 1), as we’ ve shown before, the closed-loop gain A 1/f . For small loop transmission (af 1), the closed-loop gain is approximately a( s ). If we plot a ( s ) and 1/f on the same set of axes, we can fi nd an approximation for the closed-loop gain as the lower of the two curves, as shown in Figure 1-5 .
Stability So far, we haven ’ t discussed the issue regarding the stability of closed-loop systems. There are many defi nitions of stability in the literature, but we’ ll consider BIBO stability. In other words, we ’ ll consider the stability problem given that we ’ ll only excite our system with bounded inputs. The system is BIBO stable if bounded inputs generate bounded outputs , a condition that is met if all poles are in the left-half plane ( Figure 1-6 ) .
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jv
Poles in left-half s plane for BIBO stability
Figure 1-6 : Closed-loop pole locations in the left-half plane for bounded input, bounded output (BIBO) stability.
Consider the feedback system with a fi rst-order plant and unity feedback (Figure 1-7 ) . The input/output transfer function is:
A v A o s 1 [1-7] v A 1 sA s i s 1 A
vi A v s o
Figure 1-7 : First-order system comprising an integrator inside a negative-feedback loop.
Note that as the forward-path gain A increases, the closed-loop bandwidth increases as well, with the closed-loop pole staying on the real axis at s A . As long as A is positive, this system is BIBO stable for any values of A . The second-order system (Figure 1-8a ) is also easy to work out, with transfer function:
K vo ( abss1)( 1) K v K Ks ( s i 1 ab1)( 1) ( abss1)( 1) ⎛ ⎞ ⎜ K ⎟ 1 ⎜ ⎟ [1-8] ⎝ K 1⎠ ⎛ ⎟⎞ ⎛ ⎟⎞ ⎜ ab⎟ s2 ⎜ a b⎟ s 1 ⎝⎜ ⎠⎟ ⎝⎜ ⎠⎟ 11K K
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jv
Increasing K
vi σ K v × × (t s 1)(t s 1) o 1 1 a b t t a b
(a) (b) Figure 1-8 : Second-order system with negative-feedback loop. (a) Block diagram. (b) Root locus as K increases.
The pole locations are plotted in Figure 1-8b , with the locus of closed-loop poles shown for K increasing. Note the fundamental trade-off between high DC open-loop gain (which means a small closed-loop DC error) and loop stability. For K approaching infi nity, the closed-loop poles are very underdamped.
Routh Stability Criterion The Routh test is a mathematical test that can be used to determine how many roots of the characteristic equation lie in the right-half plane. When we use the Routh test, we don ’ t calculate the location of the roots—rather, we determine whether there are any roots at all in the right-half plane, without explicitly determining where they are. The procedure for using the Routh test is as follows:
1. Write the characteristic polynomial:
1 LT.. a snn as 1 a [1-9] o 1 n Note that since we’ ve written the characteristic polynomial (1 L.T. ), we now are interested in fi nding whether there are zeros of (1 L.T. ) in the right-half plane. Zeros of (1 L.T. ) in the right-half plane correspond to closed-loop poles in the right-half plane. Furthermore, we assume that a n 0 for the analysis to proceed.
2. Next, we see if any of the coeffi cients are zero or have a different sign from the others. A necessary (but not suffi cient) condition for stability is that there are no nonzero coeffi cients in the characteristic equation and that all coeffi cients have the same sign.
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3. If all coeffi cients have the same sign, we next form a matrix with rows and columns in the following pattern, which is shown for n even.6 The table is fi lled horizontally and vertically until zeros are obtained in the rows. The third row and following rows are calculated from the previous two rows.
aaa024……… aaa135……… bbb123……… ccc123……… … … ………… 0 0 0000