Temperature Control of Heaters in Cable Extrusion Machine using PSO-ANFIS Controller

Most electrical cable manufacturing companies in Ghana and other parts of the world use solid-state based relay for controlling temperatures of heaters during cable extrusion process. Due to the on-off nature of such relays, the flow of heat is not continuous and mostly unreliable. As a result, most of the extruded cables have surface defects such as cracks, pimples and voids which affects the quality of the manufactured cable. The consequence of this is that the cable does not pass the quality assurance test hence, it is usually scraped off. This causes the companies to loose large amount of money due to material wastage. To overcome this challenge, an Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) controller tuned with Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) algorithm was designed to provide continuous temperature control during the extrusion process. To ascertain the robustness of the designed controller, it was compared with other conventional and intelligent controllers such as the Proportional Integral (PI), Fuzzy, Fuzzy-PI, and ANFIS controller. The controllers were designed and simulated using MATLAB/Simulink software. The results obtained indicated that the PSO-ANFIS controller was robust in achieving stability in terms of temperature variations.