PSO-BELBIC scheme for two-coupled distillation column process

Abstract

In the two-coupled distillation column process, keeping the tray temperatures within a specified range around their steady state values assures the specifications for top and bottom product purity. The two-coupled distillation column is a 4 Input/4 Output process. Normally, control engineers decouple the process into four independent loops. They assign a PID controller to control each loop. Tuning of conventional PID controllers is very difficult when the process is subject to external unknown factors. The paper proposes a Brain Emotional Learning Based Intelligent Controller (BELBIC) to replace conventional PID controllers. Moreover, the values of BELBIC and PID gains are optimized using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique with minimization of Integral Square Error (ISE) for all loops. The paper compares the performance of the proposed PSO-BELBICs with that of conventional PSO-PID controllers. PSO-BELBICs prove their usefulness in improving time domain behavior with keeping robustness for all loops.