• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.160-170
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• 2008

Temperature control of an enclosed thermal system which has many applications including Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP) of semiconductor wafers showed an input-constraint violation for nonlinear controllers due to inherent strong coupling between the elements [1]. In this paper, a constrained nonlinear optimal control design is developed, which accommodates input constraints using the linear algebraic equivalence of the nonlinear controllers, for the temperature control of an enclosed thermal process. First, it will be shown that design of nonlinear controllers is equivalent to solving a set of linear algebraic equations-the linear algebraic equivalence of nonlinear controllers (LAENC). Then an input-constrained nonlinear optimal controller is designed based on that LAENC using the constrained linear least squares method. Through numerical simulations, it is demonstrated that the proposed controller achieves the equivalent performances to the classical nonlinear controllers with less total energy consumption. Moreover, it generates the practical control solution, in other words, control solutions do not violate the input-constraints.