Monitoring and Control of Pressure in a Gas Plant via PID plus Feedforward Controller

This project is about the development of a controller for a process using well-established
advanced process control (APC) algorithm; mainly PID and Feedforward controls. This
work focuses on a model of a process that would be used for investigation of the
effectiveness of several control strategies towards effective control in overcoming
disturbances in the plant. The controller is observed to see how well a variable can be
manipulated and controlled in real-time implementation. However, it is well known that
the performances of these controllers much depend on the appropriate implementation of
additional functionalities such as anti-windup and feedforward, for example, in addition
to the tuning of PID parameters. The process targeted is a gas process and it mainly
focused on pressure and flow control of a gaseous pilot plant. To execute the overall
simulation, the controller is built on MATLAB/Simulink/LabVIEW which is a technical
computing program that has easily adaptable structure where control strategies and model
variables can be modified. It is shown in the results of simulation and performance
analysis of both controller and process that the PID plus Feedforward control could
substantially improve control performance with implementation of a model error. The
PID controller provides the needed reaction to the process variable to reach steady state
during setpoint changes and disturbances while the feedforward element manages to fully
eliminate the effects of disturbance injection without causing too much disruption to the
process response.