Design of a novel adaptive variable structure control law for industrial heat exchanger process representing a class of non minimum process plant

This paper presents the development of a novel adaptive backstepping sliding mode control law for temperature control of an industrial heat exchanger system. Backstepping control law has been utilized during the design of reaching mode of the sliding mode controller to ensure a smoother convergence towards sliding surface. However, in order to mitigate the problems of over-conservative approach of robust design, an adaptive mechanism has also been incorporated to find out the appropriate value of the disturbance bound. The proposed control law is robust against the effects of model uncertainties and can address the issues related to tracking problem of a non-minimum phase nonlinear systems. It has been devised in such a generalized manner that it can be used to address the control problem of any other non-minimum phase nonlinear systems.