Experience with nonlinear control and identification strategies

Many common and commercially important industrial processes such as distillation columns, chemical reactions, and pH neutralizations exhibit inherently nonlinear behavior. For these control problems, conventional PID controllers must be conservatively tuned in order to ensure closed-loop stability over the full range of operating conditions. Consequently, there are considerable incentives to develop practical control techniques based on nonlinear process models. This paper provides an overview of applications to the pH neutralization process with emphasis placed on the comparison of alternative modeling and control techniques. The author looks at radial basis function models and adaptive control.