Experimental comparison of advanced control strategies

Abstract

The objective of this research endeavor is to compare experimentally several advanced control strategies on a heat exchanger and fluid flow system. The experimental set-up was established a few years back and consists of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger with several control valves. This heat exchanger uses steam or hot water on its shell side to heat either cold or hot or a mixture of hot and cold water passing through its tube side to a desired temperature. The apparatus also contains many pneumatic control valves for controlling the flow rates of hot or cold water or steam. An experimental comparison of three control strategies (classical PID, internal model control [IMC], and process modelbased control [PMBC]) was done a couple of years earlier. The objective of this study, along with the previous one, was to implement some advanced control strategies, and present a broad-based overall perspective on the advantages and disadvantages of different control strategies. This study picks up where the last study left off, and implemented some more control strategies under similar experimental conditions. The different advanced control strategies ultimately to be implemented were neural network-based control (both inverse and normal model), model predictive control, a combination of model predictive control and neural network-based control, and heuristic-based fuzzy logic control. Thus, as a part of this study, eight different strategies were implemented. Studies on the fuzzy logic strategy were carried out separately by another graduate student.