PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF SMITH PREDICTOR THROUGH AUTOMATIC COMPUTATION OF DEAD TIME

It is known that the classical tuning formula for typical ProportionalIntegral-Derivative (PID) controllers in general provides unsatisfactory results for industrial plants where the time delay exceeds the dominant lag time. For this reason, alternative strategies have been studied in order to cope with this problem and, in this context, the most popular scheme is the Smith Predictor. In this paper the theory behind this algorithm is explained and its implementation through YS170 controller language and CENTUM CS3000 Control Drawing Builder are presented in order to verify their effectiveness in industrial environments. This approach requires a good model of the process under control. In fact, the performance of the Smith Predictor can decrease dramatically (become unstable) due to modelling errors, especially for the dead time which, contrary to what would be expected, can vary considerably depending on the working conditions (i.e. the fluid flow). In this paper a simple adaptive law for the automatic tuning of the model time delay is suggested. When this method is applied, the performance of the Smith Predictor is easily improved due to the automatically tuned model dead time and the control algorithm is capable of meeting variable working conditions.