In this work, the study of the fractional behavior of the Bateman–Feshbach–Tikochinsky and Caldirola–Kanai oscillators by using different fractional derivatives is presented. We obtained the Euler–Lagrange and the Hamiltonian formalisms in order to represent the dynamic models based on the Liouville–Caputo, Caputo–Fabrizio–Caputo and the new fractional derivative based on the Mittag–Leffler kernel with arbitrary order α. Simulation results are presented in order to show the fractional behavior of the oscillators, and the classical behavior is recovered when α is equal to 1.

In this paper, we present the design of a fractional-order sliding mode observer (FO-SMO) for actuator fault estimation in a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (QUAV) system. Actuator faults can significantly compromise the stability and performance of QUAV systems; therefore, early detection and compensation are crucial. Sliding mode observers (SMOs) have recently demonstrated their accuracy in estimating faults in QUAV systems under matched uncertainties. However, existing SMOs encounter difficulties associated with chattering and sensitivity to initial conditions and noise. These challenges significantly impact the precision of fault estimation and may even render fault estimation impossible depending on the magnitude of the fault. To address these challenges, we propose a new fractional-order SMO structure based on the Caputo derivative definition. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FO-SMO in overcoming the limitations associated with classical SMOs, we assess the robustness of the FO-SMO under three distinct scenarios. First, we examined its performance in estimating actuator faults under varying initial conditions. Second, we evaluated its ability to handle significant chattering phenomena during fault estimation. Finally, we analyzed its performance in fault estimation under noisy conditions. For comparison purposes, we assess the performance of both observers using the Normalized Root-Mean-Square Error (NRMSE) criterion. The results demonstrate that our approach enables more accurate actuator fault estimation, particularly in scenarios involving chattering phenomena and noise. In contrast, the performance of classical (non-fractional) SMO suffers significantly under these conditions. We concluded that our FO-SMO is more robust to initial conditions, chattering phenomena, and noise than the classical SMO.

In this work we present a numerical method based on the Adams-Bashforth-Moulton scheme to solve numerically fractional delay differential equations. We focus in the fractional derivative with Mittag-Leffler kernel of type Liouville-Caputo with variable-order and the Liouville-Caputo fractional derivative with variable-order. Numerical examples are presented to show the applicability and efficiency of this novel method.

In the present manuscript, we design a fractional multi-order high-gain observer to estimate temperature in a double pipe heat exchange process. For comparison purposes and since we want to prove that when using our novel technique, the estimation is more robust than the classical approach, we design a non-fractional high-gain observer, and then we compare the performance of both observers. We consider three scenarios: The first one considers the estimation of the system states by measuring only one output with no noise added on it and under ideal conditions. Second, we add noise to the measured output and then reconstruct the system states, and, third, in addition to the noise, we increase the gain parameter in both observers (non-fractional and fractional) due to the fact that we want to prove that the robustness changes in this parameter. The results showed that, using our approach, the estimated states can be recovered under noise circumstances in the measured output and under parameter change in the observer, contrary to using classical (non-fractional) observers where the states cannot be recovered. In all our tests, we used the normalized root-mean-square, integral square error, and integral absolute error indices, resulting in a better performance for our approach than that obtained using the classical approach. We concluded that our fractional multi-order high-gain observer is more robust to input noise than the classical high-gain observer.