Efficient Heat Source Control with Transportation Delay Synchronization

This paper presents the temperature control system designed for a heat source system in the form of an electric flow heater ensuring high performance of output temperature stabilization in the presence of significant flow rate variations. For this purpose, the PI controller was supplemented with a gain scheduling technique and a feedforward compensator based on a simple dynamic model. Two approaches for designing the feedforward compensator are verified. Simulation studies and practical verification show that control performance can be increased by introducing additional transportation delay time synchronization in the feedforward compensator.