A super-twisting sliding mode controller is proposed for nonlinear system with external disturbance in order to reduce chattering phenomenon. A criterion is obtained that guarantees the convergence of system states in finite time by Lyapunov stability method. Finally, the results of simulation for carbon fiber multilayer diagonal loom are presented to confirm the effectiveness of the super-twisting sliding mode controller design in agreement.

The tension control of carbon fiber diagonal weaving looms is severely affected by the coupling between structured friction and unstructured disturbances, leading to strong nonlinearities and time-varying uncertainties. To overcome the chattering and model-dependency issues inherent in traditional sliding mode control, a nonlinear dynamic model incorporating the Stribeck friction term was established. An Improved Adaptive Radial Basis Function-based Nonsingular Fast Terminal Sliding Mode Control (I-ARBF-NFTSMC) framework was then proposed. The framework adopts a divide-and-conquer composite compensation mechanism, in which a smooth Hyperbolic Tanh Fixed-Time Disturbance Observer (Tanh-FTDO) estimates external disturbances and suppresses chattering, and an Improved Adaptive Radial Basis Function (I-ARBF) neural network approximates and compensates internal nonlinear friction. Simulation results show that, compared with the conventional Fixed-Time Extended State Observer-based method (FESO-NFTSMC), the proposed controller achieves higher disturbance-estimation accuracy and tracking performance under sinusoidal, triangular, and composite disturbances. In composite-disturbance conditions, the steady-state mean-squared error is reduced by about 60%, the maximum tracking error decreases from 0.08787 N to 0.01965 N, and the settling time shortens by approximately 25.2%, while effectively mitigating high-frequency chattering. The proposed strategy achieves fast finite-time convergence with enhanced smoothness and robustness, providing a real-time executable solution for high-precision tension control in complex nonlinear weaving processes.