Control of a Thermal Airflow Process - Part II: Adaptive Self-Tuning Control

This article was motivated from a practical work on modeling and control of a time-delayed thermal airflow process using adaptive techniques. The work was divided into two parts: (I) the modeling of the process using system identification methods, with main concerns to the numerical robustness of the identification, and (II) the digital control of the process using adaptive self-tuning control, with main concerns to the adaptation of the controller to changes in the process dynamics. This article concerns the second part of the work. An adaptive self-tuning controller was implemented to improve the performance of the thermal airflow process. At each sampling interval, the process model is updated using an on-line identification strategy developed in the first part of the work. Based on the identification, the controller is self-tuned to compensate for eventual changes in the process parameters. Intentional disturbances were made in the process dynamics in order to evaluate the adaptation performance of the control system.