Control of sugarcane crushing mill process: A comparative analysis

In sugar factory there are a number of processes involved out of which, the crushing mill process which extracts the juice from sugarcane fibers is the key process which is complex and nonlinear in nature. For maximum juice extraction, maintaining the cane level in the chute at an optimum level is essential. The manipulated variable for controlling cane level is the speed of cane carrier motor. In the present paper, three different control strategies namely PID, fuzzy and prediction based control for maintaining the cane level are presented and their performance is compared.