Industrial Bound Design and Application of Fuzzy Logic PID Controller for Liquid level in Carbonisation Column

A novel approach for the design of a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) is suggested in order to improve the control of the liquid level in a carbonisation column for soda ash production. It considers the impact of the industrial environment and the signals, equipment, programmable logic controller (PLC) and real time control restrictions. A PID FLC is designed with inputs the system error and the rate of level computed via sliding average to smooth the reference step response and reduce disturbances and noise impact. The defuzzyfication is simplified and the control effort decreased assigning proper output singletons. The pre- and PI post-processing parameters are tuned in an off-line genetic algorithms based minimization of a novel fitness function of the system error and the control variance for prolonging actuator’s and valve’s lifetime. The FLC is implemented in a general purpose PLC. The real time level control shows an improved system performance.