Optimal PID control of pH neutralization plant

Abstract

pH control plays an important role in a wide range of industrial applications for waste management. The high non-linearity in pH neutralization processes and the uncertainty of the plant dynamics are key challenges that cannot be effectively addressed using PID controllers tuned with conventional methods. Some of the available and quite often tuning methods used for designing PID controllers are Cohen-Coon, Ziegler-Nichols (ZN), and Tyreus-Luyben. To address these problems, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is employed to tune the PID controller for a pH neutralization plant. The PSO algorithm is one of the most powerful methods for resolving non-smooth global optimization problems. In this paper, the mathematical model of pH process is developed taking into consideration of the overall plant's dynamics. The PSO based PID controller is then implemented and evaluated by comparing its performance with that of ZN-PID.