Control and disturbance rejection of an air conditioning system

Presents the experimental results of the modelling, identification, control and step disturbance rejection of an air conditioning system. The process has been decomposed in two subsystems connected in series with a natural feedback. It has been identified by the model based method using Marquardt´s algorithm. Due to the cascade structure of the system, the controller involves two levels. The first level (inner loop) is based on the well known internal model control approach. The second level (outer loop) uses a constrained generalised predictive control strategy. These two loops are implemented on a climatic laboratory set-up, which represents an actual industrial process. We present a solution to reject the effect of a step disturbance