Temperature control of real-time identified fixed bed reactor by adaptive sliding mode control equipped with Arduino in Matlab

Several control methodologies have been proposed in academia, but only a few of them have been implemented in industries due to their difficult implementation. This study is motivated by not only using low-cost data acquisition system such as Arduino in Matlab with little programming but also easy implementation of complex chemical process systems such as fixed bed reactor. An online identification and parameter estimation of a fixed bed reactor with Matlab package was developed. Designing a controller by using a nonlinear complicated model is a difficult task. A first-order discrete transfer function with unit delay has been identified for a fixed bed reactor for which a recursive least squares method with forgetting factor has been chosen. The Matlab program developed includes adaptive sliding mode control, determination of model order, and model verification. This work describes a Simulink-based model using Arduino, a data acquisition card used for interfacing with fixed bed reactor. A temperature trajectory tracking study was used in order to analyze the performance of the proposed strategy for control of the reactor. The controller implemented was developed using adaptive sliding mode control to control temperature of the fixed bed reactor. For safety concern, a constraint was applied to the control signal that is bounded between 0 degrees C and 130 degrees C. Temperature trajectory tracking using this algorithm is found to be good. The value of integral absolute error is found to be 387.6 for the experimental run up to 300 s.