Improving efficiency of pH control by balance-based adaptive control application

This paper deals with the efficient control of the pH process. Considering the PI + gain scheduling (PI+GS) controller as the benchmark and its control performance as the base, we investigate experimentally the overall improvement in the control performance obtained by the application of the Balance-Based Adaptive Controller (B-BAC), which requires only the measurement data of the flow rates and pH values. The improvement of the control efficiency is investigated not only in terms of the controlled variable performance but also in terms of the manipulated variable performance considered as the considerable control cost. The application of the B-BAController can ensure lower controlled pH variability at the price of the control effort similar to the PI+GS approach and thus it can improve the overall efficiency of pH control. The second important contribution is the experimental validation of the very simple and intuitive tuning procedure for the B-BAController.