Design and Implementation of PID Controller for the Cooling Tower's pH Regulation Based on Particle Swarm Optimization PSO Algorithm

Abstract

The PH regulation of cooling tower plant in southern fertilizers company (SCF) in Iraq is important for industry pipes protection and process continuity. According to the Mitsubishi standard, the PH of cooling water must be around (7.1 to 7.8). The deviation in PH parameter affects the pipes, such as corrosion and scale. Acidic water causes pipes to corrode, and alkaline water causes pipes to scale. The sulfuric acid solution is used for PH neutralization. The problem is that the sulfuric acid is pumped manually in the cooling tower plant every two or three hours for PH regulation. The manual operation of the sulfuric acid pump makes deviations in the PH parameter. It is very difficult to control the PH manually. To solve this problem, a PID controller for PH regulation was used. The reason for using the PID controller is that the PH response is irregular through the neutralization process. The methodology is to calculate the transfer function of the PH loop using the system identification toolbox of MATLAB, to design and implement a PID controller, to optimize the PID controller response using particle swarm optimization PSO algorithm, and to make a comparison among several tuning methods such as Ziegler Nichols (ZN) tuning method, MATLAB tuner method, and PSO algorithm tuning method. The results showed that the PSO-based PID controller tuning gives a better overshoot, less rise time, and an endurable settling time than the other tuning methods. Hence, the PH response became according to the target range. The experimental results showed that the PH regulation improved using the PSO-based PID controller tuning.