Experimental Comparison Between Control Schemes for a Drying Process Dynamics

This paper proposes a high performance nonlinear fuzzy controller for a drying controlprocess. The highly nonlinear characteristics of drying processes make classical control theory unableto provide the same performance results as it does in more well behaved systems. Advanced controlstrategies can be used to design temperature, relative humidity and air velocity nonlinear trackingcontrollers, in order to overcome its highly non-linear dynamics over the whole drying operatingconditions. Open-loop experiments were carried out to collect experienced-based knowledge of theprocess. PID and Fuzzy logic (FLC) real-time-based controllers were designed to perform fooddrying tests compared without controllers’ retuning. Absolute errors reached by FLC controller were3.71 and 3.93 times lower than PID for temperature and relative humidity, respectively.