Model Reference Adaptive Controller to regulate steam temperature in distillation process for essential oil extraction

This paper presents a simulated Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC) and its application to regulate steam temperature in distillation process for essential oil extraction system. Steam temperature is one of the most significant parameters that can influence the composition of essential oil yield in terms of quality and quantity. Due to parameter variations and changes in operation conditions during distillation, a robust steam temperature controller becomes nontrivial to avoid the degradation of essential oil quality. Initially, the PRBS input is triggered to the system and output of steam temperature is modeled by auto regressive exogenous (ARX) model. The online parameter estimation is implemented using recursive least squares and integrated in MRAC scheme. The performance of MRAC is evaluated. The experimental result demonstrates an efficacy of MRAC applied in distillation process and also conform the stability to the system.