Dead-Time Compensation for Wave/String PDEs

Smith predictorlike designs for compensation of arbitrarily long input delays are commonly available only for finite-dimensional systems. Only very few examples exist, where such compensation has been achieved for partial differential equation (PDE) systems, including our recent result for a parabolic (reaction-diffusion) PDE. In this paper, we address a more challenging wave PDE problem, where the difficulty is amplified by allowing all of this PDE’s eigenvalues to be a distance to the right of the imaginary axis. Antidamping (positive feedback) on the uncontrolled boundary induces this dramatic form of instability. We develop a design that compensates an arbitrarily long delay at the input of the boundary control system and achieves exponential stability in closed-loop. We derive explicit formulae for our controller’s gain kernel functions. They are related to the open-loop solutions of the antistable wave equation system over the time period of input delay (this simple relationship is the result of the design approach).