Active Disturbance Rejection Thermal Control of a Mechanically Pumped
Two-Phase Loop: An Experimental Study
Abstract
High-heat-flux heat removal is critical for the long-term safety of the
high-power electronic device, while the precise and uniform temperature
control is challenging due to various uncertainties. To this end, active
disturbance rejection controller (ADRC), hybrid with feed-forward
flow-rate/sub-cooling controller, is introduced for the temperature
regulation of a multiple degree-of-freedom mechanically pumped two-phase
loop. Based on the proposed experimental setup, the optimal references
of sub-cooling and flow-rate are identified and used as the feed-forward
law for auxiliary loop control, and ADRC is used in the primary loop to
control the evaporator wall temperature. The experimental results
indicate the efficiency of thermal control for the mechanically pumped
two-phase loop via combination of primary and auxiliary loop. In
addition, ADRC performs better in both temperature tracking and
disturbance rejection when compared with the conventional PI controller,
and its superiority consists in faster tracking and stronger robustness
to disturbances and couplings.