Web-Based Control System of an Air Conditioner Experimental Rig with Adaptive Fuzzy PI Controller

Abstract

The paper describes a web-based remote control system for an air conditioner experimental rig, which provides a unified and flexible Web-based interface to access the experimental rig located remotely. The hardware and software infrastructure of the control system is presented. The rig is composed of two test rooms, in which temperature and humidity are required to keep constant. The weakness using conventional PI controllers in the temperature control of the test room is analyzed. To improve the control performance over PI controllers, an adaptive fuzzy PI controller is developed. In the proposed control scheme, the increment of the PI controller parameters can be adjusted online by fuzzy rules according to the error of the controlled variable and the change of the error. Thus, PI controller parameters of the proposed control strategy can be optimized under close-loop operation. Field test results demonstrate that the adaptive Fuzzy PI controller has better performance than conventional PI controllers.