Abstract:The control of thermal interfaces has gained importance in recent years because of the high cost of heating and cooling materials in many applications. Thus, the main focus in this work is to compare the second and third generations of the CRONE controller (French acronym of Commande Robuste d'Ordre Non Entier), which means a non-integer order robust controller, and to synthesize a robust controller that can fit several types of systems. For this study, the plant consists of a rectangular homogeneous bar of length L, where the heating element in applied on one boundary, and a temperature sensor is placed at distance x from that boundary (x is considered very small with respect to L). The type of material used is the third parameter, which may help in analyzing the robustness of the synthesized controller. The originality of this work resides in controlling a non-integer plant using a fractional order controller, as, so far, almost all of the systems where the CRONE controller has been implemented were of integer order. Three case studies were defined in order to show how and where each CRONE generation controller can be applied. These case studies were chosen in such a way as to influence the asymptotic behavior of the open-loop transfer function in the Black-Nichols diagram in order to point out the importance of respecting the conditions of the applications of the CRONE generations. Results show that the second generation performs well when the parametric uncertainties do not affect the phase of the plant, whereas the third generation is the most robust, even when both the phase and the gain variations are encountered. However, it also has some limitations, especially when the temperature to be controlled is far from the interface when the density of flux is applied.