Predictive active disturbance rejection control for processes with time delay

•A new control structure: predictive active disturbance rejection control is proposed in this paper.•The control strategy is designed for system with time‐delay.•A comparative study is presented with regard to the recently proposed methods.•Simulation studies, hardware‐in‐the‐loop tests, and the frequency response analysis are provided.

Active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) has been shown to be an effective tool in dealing with real world problems of dynamic uncertainties, disturbances, nonlinearities, etc. This paper addresses its existing limitations with plants that have a large transport delay. In particular, to overcome the delay, the extended state observer (ESO) in ADRC is modified to form a predictive ADRC, leading to significant improvements in the transient response and stability characteristics, as shown in extensive simulation studies and hardware-in-the-loop tests, as well as in the frequency response analysis. In this research, it is assumed that the amount of delay is approximately known, as is the approximated model of the plant. Even with such uncharacteristic assumptions for ADRC, the proposed method still exhibits significant improvements in both performance and robustness over the existing methods such as the dead-time compensator based on disturbance observer and the Filtered Smith Predictor, in the context of some well-known problems of chemical reactor and boiler control problems.