Self tuning PID controller for steam distillation essential oil extraction system

Controlling a temperature for a distillation system is not an easy task. The lag of this process is normally long. Over heating during the operation can cause quality degradation of the essential oil produced. The conventional method of controlling this kind of process is not capable of giving satisfactory result. In this paper the self tuning PID controller is developed to improvise the steam distillation temperature control. This paper is intended to compare the performance of PID, Fuzzy Logic and Self tuning PID controller in term of rise time, % overshoot and settling time. The ARX (Auto Regressive Exogenous) model has been utilized to represent the dynamic of the steam distillation process. From the simulation, it is clearly shown that self tuning PID controller give better performance compared with conventional Fuzzy logic and PID controller.