ZIEGLER-NICHOL’S
LUIS DANIEL DE LA GARZA PEREZ
INTRODUCTION
The time-honored Ziegler-Nichols tuning rule [2,3] ("Z-N rule"),
as introduced in the 1940s, had a large impact in making PID
feedback controls acceptable to control engineers. PID was
known, but applied only reluctantly because of stability
concerns. With the Ziegler-Nichols rule, engineers finally had a
practical and systematic way of tuning PID loops for improved
performance. Never mind that the rule was based on science
fiction.
METHOD FOR PID TUNING
The Ziegler-Nichols rule is a heuristic PID tuning rule that attempts to produce good
values for the three PID gain parameters:
1. Kp - the controller path gain
2. Ti - the controller's integrator time constant
3. Td - the controller's derivative time constant
given two measured feedback loop parameters derived from measurements:
1. the period Tu of the oscillation frequency at the stability limit
2. the gain margin Ku for loop stability
3.
with the goal of achieving good regulation (disturbance rejection).
PID PARAMETERS
Given the magnitude and phase open-loop response curves of the plant,
you can fit the assumed model in the following manner.
1. The ratio of output level to input level at low frequencies determines the
gain parameter K of the model.
2. Observe the frequency Fu at which the phase passes through -pi
radians (-180 degrees). The inverse of this frequency is the period of
the oscillation, Tu.
3. Observe the plant gain Kc that occurs at the critical oscillation frequency
Fu. The inverse of this is the gain margin Ku.
4. Apply the frequency Fu to the plant first order lag terms to solve for the
model's a term.
5. Evaluate the phase shift of the lag stage by substituting Fu
into the first-order lag model
6. The rest of the 180 degrees of phase shift are assigned to the
pure time delay term.
In practice, you don't need to construct the complete model, and
you can stop after completing step 3 above.
EXAMPLE
The following illustration shows plotted data of the
system's open loop frequency response, gain and
phase, as captured by an automated online test
performed by the PIDZMON command, described in
another note on this site. The green lines and the
magenta line have been superimposed on the screen
capture image.
Tracing along the horizontal green line in the lower plot, we can see that the critical
180 degree phase shift occurs at a location that is about 120/200 of the Nyquist
frequency. Given that the sampling rate was 50 Hz, this would correspond to a
critical frequency 0.6 * 1/2 * 50 Hz, or 15 Hz. The corresponding critical time
interval is the inverse, Tu=0.06666 seconds.
Tracing vertically at this frequency along the magenta line, the upper plot shows
that the open loop gain of the plant has rolled off to a value of about 0.09 here.
Applying a controller gain of about 11.1 as indicated by the green brackets would
result in a net loop gain 1.0 with a phase shift of 180 degrees, so the system would
be operating with sustained oscillation at the stability limit. Thus, the gain margin
Ku is about 11.1.
Choosing the classical Ziegler-Nichols tuning rule, we would then determine that
the PID gains should
CLASICAL TUNING RULE
Choosing the classical Ziegler-Nichols tuning rule,
we would then determine that the PID gains should
be
loop gain Kp = 0.6 * Ku = 6.7
integral time constant Ti = 0.5 * Tu = 0.033
derivative time constant Td = 0.125 * Tu = .0083