In this article we will show how to do a third order system identification using excel. The identification takes place in the Laplace domain (
) where the optimal system parameters are found by using the gradient descend method.
Consider the following second order system, a DC motor for example:
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Where
,
,
are the optimal parameters to be found by minimizing the cost function:

Transforming the system to the Z-domain by using Euler’s forward approximation:
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Which leads to the following difference equations:
The cost function to be minimized is :
The validation shows a satisfactory match between the estimated and the real model:

$ls postfix.txt > Johnny