Summary:

I tried playing around with the Oplev loop shape on ITMY, in order to see if I could successfully engage the Coil Driver whitening. Unfortunately, I had no success tonight.

Details:

I was trying to guess a loop shape that would work - I guess this will need some more careful thought about loop shape optimization. I was basically trying to keep all the existing filters, and modify the low-passing that minimizes control noise injection. By adding a 4th order elliptic low pass with corner at 50Hz and stopband attenuation of 60dB yielded a stable loop with upper UGF of ~6Hz and ~25deg of phase margin (which is on the low side). But I was able to successfully engage this loop, and as seen in Attachment #1, the noise performance above 50Hz is vastly improved. But it also seems that there is some injection of noise around 6Hz. In any case, as soon as I tried to engage the dewhitening, the DAC output quickly saturated. The whitening filter for the ITMs has ~40dB of gain at ~40Hz already, so it looks like the high frequency roll-off has to be more severe.

I am not even sure if the Elliptic filter is the right choice here - it does have the steepest roll off for a given filter order, but I need to look up how to achieve good roll off without compromising on the phase margin of the overall loop. I am going to try and do the optimization in a more systematic way, and perhaps play around with some of the other filters' poles and zeros as well to get a stable controller that minimizes control noise injection everywhere.