Design and simulation of a novel FOIMC-PD/P double-loop control structure for CSTRs and bioreactors

The design of control methods for unstable plants is somewhat complex than that of stable plants. This is because unstable process models contain one or more poles lying on the right of the s-plane which yields unbounded closed-loop response. Further, the presence of the dead-time induces more complexity as it decreases the gain and phase margins which in turn deteriorates the closed-loop performance. The design of control strategies become more challenging for plants of unstable nature with positive zeros because they exhibit a phenomenon called inverse response. This paper suggests a method to design a double-loop scheme for unstable plants with/without inverse response. Accordingly, a proportional-derivative (PD)/proportional (P) controllers are used in the inner-loop for stabilizing the plant. A fractional order internal model controller (FOIMC) scheme is used to obtain the outer-loop controller using the stabilized plant model. The P/PD controller settings have been obtained by using the Routh-stability criteria and the maximum sensitivity approach. Procedure for selecting the outer-loop tuning parameter and fractional order is also given. Linear and nonlinear models of unstable plants including bioreactors and isothermal chemical reactors are used to demonstrate the merits of the suggested strategy. Robustness of the design and effect of measurement noise are also studied. Integrated absolute/squared error measures are also calculated. The suggested design is found to be more effective in controlling unstable processes than some reported works.