Abstract
The ship's propulsion efficiency depends upon a combibation of engine and propeller. The propeller has better efficiency as the engine has lower rotational speed. This situation led the engine manufacures to design the engine that has lower speed, longer stroke and a small number of cylinders. With this new trends the conventional mechanical-hydrualic governors for engine speed control have been replaced by digital speed controllers which adopted the PID control or the optimal control algorithm. But these control algorithms have not enough robustness to suppress the variations of the delay-time and the parameter perturbation especially in low speed engine. In this study we consider the perturbations of the engine parameters as the modeling uncetainties and design a robust speed controller for marine medium speed diesel engine by means of $ extit{H}_{infty}$control theory having the central solution. By comparing the results of the robust speed controller with those of mechanical governor and PID controller, the validity of the robust speed controller under parameter variations is confirmed. The speed control of the experimental diesel engine of carried out using actuator which is composed of PWM signal generator and D.C servo motor.
