pH control in sodium chlorate cell for energy efficiency using PSO-FOPID controller

Industrial sodium chlorate production is a highly energy-intensive electro-chemical process. If the pH of the chlorate cell is not controlled, the current efficiency drops from 99% to as low as 66.66%. Hence control of chlorate cell pH is very significant for energy-efficient sodium chlorate production. This study puts forward a fractional order PID controller for controlling the pH of the sodium chlorate cell. The tuning of FOPID controller variables is affected by employing particle swarm optimization. The highlight of the controller is that it is flexible, easy to deploy and the time of computation is significantly low as few parameters are needed to be adjusted in PSO. The performance analysis of the suggested FOPID-PSO controller was studied and compared with the traditional PI controller and PID controller using time-domain provisions like settling time, rise time and peak overshoot and error indicators like integral square error (ISE), integral absolute error (IAE), and integral time absolute error (ITAE). FOPID controller employing PSO proved to perform well compared to conventional controllers with 0.5 sec settling time and 0.1 sec rise time. This demonstrates that the FOPID-PSO controller has better setpoint tracking, which is very essential for the process under consideration.