Classical PI Controllers with Anti-Windup Techniques Applied on Level Systems: An Interesting Case Study

Systems which present the actuator element saturation for a long time can force high overshoot peaks due to the integral action. Considering that, the main objective of this work is to carry out a case study of an Anti-Windup Technique (AWT) with 5 distinct classic Proportional-Integral (PI) controllers applied on a SMAR didactic level system, where the results with and without AWT are compared to each one. The tests were carried out through implementations in MATLAB software, where the results showed a high necessity to use anti-windup techniques in these systems. As for the controller's tuning method efficiency, the Integral of Squared Error (ISE) index proved that the Cohen-Coon and Ziegler-Nichols controllers showed better results.