Model-free control of a thermal plant

This paper deals with the model-free control of a thermal plant with nonlinear and time-varying dynamics. It is shown that so-called intelligent PI controllers are well suited to cope with the uncertain plant behaviour. By exploiting the basic ideas of intelligent PI control a sliding-mode controller is derived. Experimental results demonstrate that the ¿intelligent¿ concepts are superior to a standard PI controller with a setting found by classic tuning rules.and sliding-mode controller"intelligent" conceptstuning rules.