Temperature Control of Steam Distillation using First Generation of CRONE (CRONE-1)

Changes in the dynamics of steam temperature happens due to several factors such as variation of water level, capacity of loads, error in modelling and others have made the control effort more challenging. In addition, changes in plant model parameters have disturbed the reliability of the system and can jeopardize the consistency of essential oils. A CRONE controller, which stands for Non-integer order robust controller, was used in this paper to satisfy the robustness property in terms of time constant variation and desired phase margin. Steam distillation process modelling was obtained in First Order plus Dead Time (FOPDT) structure where the CRONE element, design specification and gain crossover frequency were addressed in this study. The performance of the proposed controller was evaluated in time and frequency domain to reveal the robustness of the controller.