Adaptive Control Design for a Mimo Chemical Reactor

Abstract

The major disadvantage of non-adaptive control systems is that these control systems cannot cope with fluctuation in the parameters of the process. One solution to this problem is to use high levels of feedback gain to decrease the sensitivity of the control system. However high gain controllers have two major problems: large signal magnitude and closed loop instability. The solution to this problem is to develop a control system that adapts to changes in the process. This paper presents the design of adaptive controller to a Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) chemical reactor. The proposed adaptive controller is tested by using Math lab Simulink program and its performance is compared to a conventional controller for a different situation. The paper demonstrated that while the adaptive controller exhibits superior performance in the presence of noise the convergence time is typically large and there is a large overshoot. The results from the case study indicate that the use of adaptive controller can be extended to process with inverse response. For such process the adaptive controller will be superior to the conventional controller even without parameters change in the process. Although the conventional controller has the smaller response time, it is incapable of eliminating the inverse response.