Design and optimal tuning of fraction order controller for multiple stage evaporator system

Abstract

The tight control of the process parameters through appropriate tuning of controllers is an art that imperatively employed to various process industries. Most of these industries are influenced by the nonlinearity that occurred due to the input parameter variation and presence of disturbances. The aim of this work is to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of a paper industry based energy intensive unit named Multiple Stage Evaporator (MSE) in presence of different Energy Reduction Schemes. MSE is used to concentrate the weak Black Liquor (BL), a biomass based byproduct. Hence, to extract the bioenergy from the BL, the quality of the product liquor needs to be appropriately controlled. The quality of BL is measured by two process parameters, product concentration and temperature. Hence, in this work, an intelligent controller Fraction Order Proportional-Integral-Derivative controller has been studied and employed to resolve the servo and the regulatory problem occurred during the process. A state-of-art metaheuristic approach, Black Widow Optimization Algorithm has been proposed here to tune the controller parameters and compared with another optimization approaches named Water Cycle Algorithm. The simulated result demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed strategy and confirm the performance improvement for the process parameters. To enlighten the advantages of the proposed control scheme, a comparative analysis have also been performed with conventional PID, 2-DOF-PID and FOPID controllers.