Auto-tuning of PID Controller for Distillation Process with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Method

Distillation column is the most common thermal separation unit used in various types of industries, i.e. Petroleum refineries, Chemical process industries, Pharmaceutical industries, water purification and desalination plants, etc., understanding its behaviour and accordingly designing a control system has been defined a good characteristic of a process control engineer. In order to perform separation distillation column requires a huge amount of energy for both heating and cooling. Thus, to make the whole process more economic, it is desirable to design and control the energy efficient process in order to improve the purity of finality and the intermediate products. As the distillation column is a multivariable, non-linear and highly interactive process, to control it efficiently, there is always a need to develop innovative and advanced control strategies in order to obtain high economic performance. When traditional PID controller tuning methods fail to provide optimal values of PID parameters, we need to go for advanced control strategies. In order to use these advanced control strategies, the process model is required to obtain. In recent times, many advanced control strategies are available like Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and many other soft-computing techniques can be used for an optimal tuning of PID controller.