Robust nonlinear control design with application to a marine cooling system

In this paper we consider design of control laws for a class of nonlinear systems with time-varying state delays by use of principles from feedback linearization. To deal with model uncertainties and delay mismatches, a robust linear H-inf controller is designed for the feedback linearized system. In this context, we apply a bilinear transformation to obtain a well-posed H-inf problem. The design procedure is applied to a marine cooling system with flow dependent delays and performance of the resulting control design is evaluated through a simulation example where a comparison is made to a linear control design.