Three element drum level control using MATLAB/Simulink and OPC

In Industrial Automation, we have devices and softwares from multiple vendors. For the ease of communication, Open Platform Communication(OPC) is used which enables the communication between multi-vendor devices without any restriction. In this paper, a control strategy is devised based on Boiler three element control which gives accurate Drum level control. The overall system is designed in MATLAB/Simulink and the software communicates with the PLC using Kepware OPC. The experiments conducted show the accuracy of the output with varying degree of load applied to the Boiler and with varying drum pressure.