Efficient Fuzzy Control of a Biochemical Reactor

Abstract

Fuzzy logic control based on the Takagi–Sugeno inference method has been applied for the yeast alcoholic fermentation running in a continuous-time biochemical reactor in this paper. A type-1 fuzzy PID controller was designed to temperature control in a biochemical reactor. The fuzzy PID controller was also designed using type-2 fuzzy sets. The advantage of the fuzzy control is that it can be used very successfully for control of strongly non-linear processes and processes that are difficult to model because of complicated reaction kinetics. Obtained simulation results confirm this fact. The disadvantage of the fuzzy control design lies in the time-consuming tuning of controllers. The subtractive clustering method was used to identify the rule base. This approach was chosen to minimize the number of rules of the designed fuzzy logic controllers and to simplify the fuzzy controller design. Simulation results confirm that fuzzy PID controllers can assure better performance than conventional PID controllers. Yeast alcoholic fermentation is an exothermic process and the cooling is necessary to maintain the optimal temperature in the reactor. Fuzzy PID control reduces coolant consumption in comparison with conventional PID control and so it assures energy-efficient control of continuous-time alcoholic fermentation. Using type-2 fuzzy sets in the fuzzy PID controller design is very promising as the type-2 fuzzy controller offers even better results than the type-1 fuzzy controller.