Active disturbance rejection control of temperature of thermoelectric module

Y This article presents an active disturbance rejection approach for the control of the temperature in the cold face of a thermoelectric module fed by a type buck DC-DC converter. The dynamics of the module is seen as a disturbance of an unknown nature and varying in time, of the output voltage of the converter. Said disturbance is estimated by means of a generalized proportional integral type observer, which in combination with the controller allows to regulate the temperature on the cold face of the thermoelectric module to a desired constant value. The designed observer simultaneously estimates the step-down converter output voltage and the exogenous disturbance in an on-line cancellation scheme, known as active disturbance rejection control. For comparison pur-poses, a proportional integral type controller and a linear quadratic regulator are designed, based on an approximate linearization of the combined dynamic model of the buck converter and the module. The experimental results were obtained by means of an experimental prototype and allow to show the effectiveness of proposed control technique for this type of thermoelectric devices.