Simulation and Experiment of PID Applied to the Automatic Voltage Control of Gyrotron Traveling Wave Tubes.

To set up an automatic hot test platform of gyrotron traveling wave tubes (gyro-TWTs), feedback controls of proportional–integral–derivative (PID) were applied. Simulation of the controlling process of operating voltage on the gyro-TWT cathode had been carried out by MATLAB and then was verified as well as compared by the hot test experiment. The PID control on cathode–anode voltage is typical and similar to the control of beam current achieved by the heater filament. The operating voltage controlling process includes two different stages, i.e., the voltage rise and voltage maintenance phase. By optimizing the operating parameters of the PID algorithm, the simulated voltage rise has a good agreement with the one in the hot test controlling. Furthermore, PID responses after feedback control with sinusoidal and random fluctuations are, respectively, investigated. This paper indicates that the proposed strategy can easily achieve a stable operating voltage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]