Control Systems: How Does High Gain Affect the System?

[NoOne0507]

I came up with this question while studying for an upcoming exam. I had a design problem, my solution gave me a gain of about 5500 with a PI compensator. Does having that high of a gain screw with my system? It gives me the desired results in MATLAB, but are there any drawbacks to doing that?

 

[milesyoung]

There are many signals to consider in even a simple SISO system before you try to physically implement your control system. An important sanity check of your design, among many others, is to look at the response of your controller to an appropriate change in reference signal, load disturbance etc.

Since the signal from your controller is usually fed to an actuator, will said actuator saturate, for instance, to a step change (of some reasonable magnitude) in reference signal, if that's the type of change it will have to deal with when it's up and running?