Design of neural network and PLC-based water flow controller

Abstract

Flow rate is a fundamental physical quantity in the fluid transportation system from one place to another. To achieve this, a reliable controller that is able to produce a constant flowrate in industry is needed. The most used flow controllers in industries are PID-based controllers that are implemented using PLCs. However, there are still shortcomings, they can perform poorly in some applications, for example in the highly nonlinear system which cannot be overcome by conventional PID controllers. There are some other limitations of PID controller, such as PID has the overshoot and undershoots in the output of controlled system and PID gives late response in this study, a neural network-based flow controller is proposed to deal with that problems. The controller will be operated in a miniature plant which consists of a water tank, water pump, a control valve, and a flow transmitter. Due to PLC limitation that cannot be programmed with common programming languages such as MATLAB, a personal computer (PC) is used to run the proposed neural network controller. The PC communicates with the PLC using OPC (OLE for Process Control) server, while the PLC reads the flow transmitter and also controls the control valve directly based on the result output of the neural network controller. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed controller, several experiments have been conducted. The performance of the proposed controller has been compared with the conventional PID controller. It shows that neural network-based controller outperformed the conventional PID controller, in terms of maximum overshoot and steady-state error, where the neural network controller has maximum overshoot = 5.36% and steady-state error = 0.85%, while the PID controller has 11.3% for overshoot and 1.10 % for steady-state error.

PLC-based PID controller for real-time pH neutralization process using Palm Oil Mill Effluent

“…The RSLinx OPCserver is used for the communication protocol between PLC and MATLAB. A recent study by Ahmad et al [18] using the PLC-OPC server MATLAB communication system was carried out to compare the performance of a traditional PID controller with a neural network controller for PLC-based water flow process control.…”

Research on motion control system of cutting arm of mining equipment based on fuzzy neural PID control

“…Because of the randomness of the coal and rock distribution in the heading section and the time-varying of the position between the origin of the heading machine space coordinate and the axis of the roadway center, it is difficult to establish the mathematical model of the motion control system of the cutting arm.In view of the serious time-varying and uncertainty of the cutting arm movement, the paper combines the advantages of the fuzzy PID controller, such as strong robustness [2], automatic adjustment of PID parameters and high control precision, etc. , neural network can deal with the uncertainty of the object [3] , has good self-learning and self-adaptive ability.A fuzzy neural adaptive PID control system is proposed, which can not only solve the on-line adjustment of PID controller parameters [4] , but also master the fuzzy control rules and membership functions effectively, it is expected to realize fast and smooth adjustment to the disturbance and the change of controlled object, control the movement of the cutting arm according to the predetermined trajectory in the boundary of the roadway, and improve the efficiency and quality of the roadway forming.…”