ADAPTIVE MULTIVARIABLE PID CONTROLOF A DISTILLATION COLUMN WITH UNKNOWN AND VARYING DEAD TIME

Abstract A new, reliable, and easy-to-use adaptive control strategy has been developed to overcome the long-existing difficulties in adaptive control practice caused by unknown and varying process dead time. A self-tuning PID control algorithm is adopted to control a distillation column possessing second-order-plus-dead-time dynamics. The self-tuning strategy is based on recursive least-squares estimation of process parameters. U-D factorization is applied to stabilize the parameter estimation calculations. A variable forgetting factor is used to alleviate wind-up in the estimator. A simulation study and an experimental evaluation demonstrate the capability of the adaptive algorithm.