Temperature Control of a Plastic Extrusion Barrel Using PID

Fuzzy Controllers
J.S. T a d , C.W. Taoi and C.C. Tsait

+Dept. of Electrical Engineering

National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan
TEL: (04) 285- 1549 x235, Email: jstaur@dragon.nchu.edu.tw

:Department of Electrical Engineering

National I-Lan Institute of Agriculture and Technology, I-Lan, Taiwan

logic techniques[2, 131. Fuzzy control systems have the advan-

Abstract. In this paper, a new PID fuzzy scheme is pro-
posed to control the temperature of a plastic extrusion bar-
rel. This fuzzy controller is based on the proportional-integral-
derivative fuzzy control scheme with if-then rules and triangular
membership functions. For a traditional PID controller, the out-
put i s a linear combination of the error of the system, the deriva-
tive of the error, and the integral of the error. On the other hand.
a conventional fuzzy controller has a nonlinear function of the
error of the system and the derivative of the error as output.
In this case, the output U can he expressed as f ( e , e ) . Since a
nonlinear controller can usually control a nonlinear system more
efficiently, fuzzy controllers often provide better performances
than PID controllers in ternis of shorter rise time and smaller
overshoot. However, the traditional fuzzy controller cannot im-
prove its steady-state performance for time-varying syst,ems. To
avoid this drawback, the integral of the error of the system should
be taken into consideration. This motivates the PID fuzzy con-
trollers. In this paper, the design of this controller will be briefly
described. Then the experiment results will be demonstrated.
It will be shown that the PID fuzzy control algorithm can meet,
the requirement of this temperature control project.
tages of being robust to the variations of system dynamics[ll]
and model-free without precise information required[l4]. They
have been successfully used in the complex ill-defined processes
with better performances than that of a P D controller [8]. How-
ever, there are still difficulties in the design of fuzzy controllers.
One of the important problems involved with the design of fuzzy
logic controllers is the complexity of fuzzy controllers. The com-
plexity of fuzzy controllers increases exponentially as the number
of input variables of fuzzy controllers increases. Because of this
difficulty, so far in the literature, most of the fuzzy controllers
are designed basically based on the P D control scheme instead
of PID control scheme. Therefore the steady-state performance
for time-varying systems becomes a drawback of the fuzzy con-
troller.
In this paper, a robust fuzzy controller based on the PID
control scheme is applied to control the temperature of a plastic
extrusion barrel. The diagram of plastic extrusion barrel control
system is shown in Figure 1. The required temperature setting
is 190°C, 200°C, 210°C, and 200°C for section one. section two,
ection three, and section four respectively.

1 Introduction
Plastic Extrusion Barrel
The Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers are very
popular controllers in industrial control systems because they
can improve the steady-state error of the system[7], and perform
better than PD and P I controllers. Although great effort has
been devoted to develop PID controllers, traditional PID con-
trollers are not robust to the parameter variations of the plants SSR SSR SSR SSR
being controlled. Moreover, it takes time for the automatically
self-tuned PID controllers to on-line adapt themselves up to their
final states.
In the past several years, a large number of papers [ l , 3 , 4 . 6,
10, 121 focused on the robust control systems based on the fuzzy
COMPUTER & INTERFACE
This study was partly supported by Industrial Technology
Figure 1: Block diagram of the control system.
- -
Research Institute.

0-7803-2646-6 370

Authorized licensed use limited to: ANNA UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on June 12, 2009 at 06:09 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 3 Experiments and Discussions
2 PID Fuzzy Controllers
In the following, we will describe the requirements of the p r o j d
In order to have the advantages of fuzzy controllers and PID and the performance of the proposed PID fuzzy controller. First.
controllers at the same time, the PID fuzzy controller must take section four of the plastic extrusion barrel is modeled by a first-
the error of the system, the derivative of error, and the integral order system with time delay. The transfer function adopted
of error as inputs. In general, the output U will be a nonlinear is
function
U = Fprn(e, e, S e ) .
e-flPS
G ( s ) = Kp- (1)
T,s +1
The integral of error is included here to improve the steady-stak
response. As mentioned in the previous section, the complexity where ,Kp = 0.66, 0, = 375, and T, = 2870. The universes of
of the controller goes up exponentially as the number of input discourse of e, y and U are fuzzily partitioned into eight, five.
variables increases. To simplify the design of the PID fuzzy and seven fuzzy sets respectively. One example of the iules 15
controller, the error and the derivative of error are used as the the following:
inputs of the fuzzy if-then rules and the integral of error is taken
into consideration at the defuzzification stage of the controller.
By using triangular type membership functions and the cen- RI : ‘‘If e is positive medium and P. is posive small.
troid defuzzification method[5, 91, the output of the PID fuzzy then U is positive big.”
controller becomes The result from the PID fuzzy controller is shown in Figure
4. The temperature curve has short rise time and almost no
overshoot.
In the secon(d part, a similar scheme is used to control the
where m1denotes the membership value, n denotes the number of temperature of CL plastic extrusion barrel based on the computer
fuzzy if-then rules, and q;s represent the center of corresponding simulation with transfer function in Eq. 1. Sampling period is
fuzzy sets for the output variable (cf. Figure 2.) The QI is defined first set to be t,hree seconds. The controllers are designed to
as obtain a fast response and satisfy the following constraints.
QI = PI +
PI(/ e ) 1. ‘The average steady-state error should be smaller than 0.5”(
where pi is a constant for rule 1 and FI is a nonlinear function. 2. Overshootas larger than 3°C are not allowed.
The nonlinear function FI used here is shown in Figure 3 .
3. The peak error in the steady state should be smaller than
1°C.
Since the model described in Eq. 1 is somewhat differmt,
from the real system, some modifications of the parameters are
needed. PID fuzzy controllers are adopted to alleviate the steady-
state error due to the inaccuracy of the model by taking the inte-
gral of error into consideration. The performance of the control
scheme can be evaluated in the following three aspects.
nb nm ns ze ps pm pb

Figure 2: Membership function of the output of the fuzzy controller.

I
?50LL
0 500
‘
11000 1500 2000 2500
I
3000 35M) 4000 4500
I
5000

Figure 3: The nonlinear function for the integration of the error. Figure 4: The computer simulation of the temperature response of
the fourth section.

- - 371

Authorized licensed use limited to: ANNA UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on June 12, 2009 at 06:09 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.

1 Transient apd steady-state behavior with the default set
ting of the temperature.
2. The reaction of the fuzzy controller to the external distur
bances
3. The behavior of the fuzzy controller when the setting of
the temperature is altered.
Transient and Steady-state Behavior In this experiment.
the four temperature sections of the barrel are controlled sep-
arately. That is, each section has its own fuzzy controller. To
avoid severe overheating, some heuristic fuzzy rules are utilized
to restrict the outputs of the fuzzy controllers. For example. if
the second section is somewhat overheated. the outputs of the
first and the third section will be reduced by certain amount.
The transient response are shown in Figure 5 to Figure 8. And
the steady-state response curves of different sections are shown
in Figure 9 to Figure 12.
Sampling Period In order to take the temperature after the
heat is distributed more evenly and to allow more complex al-
gorithm to be implemented, the sampling period is increased to
5 seconds. With this new setting, the response curves are sini-
ilar to the ones with the previous sampling period. However.
the steady state errors become larger as shown in Figure 13 to
16. Since originally the sampling period is shorter, the controller
can respond to the temperature more quickly. However. if longer
computation is required for the algorithm, e.g. neural network
algorithm with on-line learning, the increase of the sampling pe-
riod will be inevitable.
The Response to the External Disturbances After the
system reaches the steady state, we fan the barrel to decrease the
temperature. We found that only the fourth section exhibits an
obvious drop of the temperature. There is almost no influence
on the other three sections. The temperature will go back t o
normal after the disturbance is removed. Figure 17 shows how
the temperature of the fourth section fluctuates and then returns
to the normal value. In this experiment, the disturbance came
into the system at about the 220th time sample
Variation of Temperature Setting Two experiments about
the change of t,emperature setting are conducted. First. the de-
fault temperature of the fourth section is adjusted to 190°C.
After t,he system gets to the steady state, the required temper-
ature is set to 200°C again. The response is shown in Figure
17. In this process, the other three sections are not affected. To
further test the performance of the controller on the variation of
the required t*emperature,the same procedure is applied to the
third section of the barrel. The results are shown in Figure 18.
~
4 Discussion
The PID fuzzy control scheme is applied to control the temper-
ature of a plastic extrusion barrel. A computer-based system
is adopted to implement the control scheme. The experiments
shows that the PID fuzzy control algorithm can meet the re-
quirement of this project and the results are much better than
the conventional PID controllers. In our experiments, we found
- 372 -
Authorized licensed use limited to: ANNA UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on June 12, 2009 at 06:09 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
that the fourth section is almost decoupled with the others. So
the temperature of this section is easiest to control. However.
the other three sections are tightly coupled together. Although
simple ad hoc procedures can achieve the goal, it is believed that
a real MIMO control scheme will be more effective. The MIMO
fuzzy control algorithm is under investigation.
References
[l] S. Chiu, S. Chand, D. Moore, and A . Chaudhary. Fuzzy
logic for control of roll and moment for a flexible wing air-
craft. IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 11(4):42-48, 1991.
[2] D. Dubois and H. Prade. Fuzzy Sets and Systems: Th,rory
and Applications. Academic Press, New York, 1980.
[3] S. Hayashi. Auto-tuning of fuzzy pi controller. In Procreding
of IFSA on Engineering, Brussels, pages 41-44, 1991.
[4] L.J. Huang and M. Tomizuka. A self-paced fuzzy track-
ing controller for two-dimensional motion control. IEEE
Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybern., SMC-20(5):1115--
1124, September/October 1990.
[5] B. Kosko. Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems. Prentice-
Hall, New Jersey, 1992.
[6] Y.S.Kung and C.M. Liaw. A fuzzy controller improving
a linear model following controller for motor drives. IEEE
Trans. on Fuzzy Systems, 2(3):194-202, August 1994.
[7] B. C. Kuo. Automatic Control System. Prentice-Hall, New
Jersey, fouth edition, 1982.
[8] C.C. Lee. Fuzzy logic in control systems: Fuzzy logic
controller-part i. IEEE Trans. o n System, Man and Cy-
bern., pages 404-418, April 1990.
[9] C.C. Lee. Fuzzy logic in control systems: Fuzzy logic
controller-part ii. IEEE Trans. on System, Man and Cy-
bern., SMC-20(2):419-435, March/April 1990.
[lo] Y.F. Li and C.C. Lau. Development of fuzzy algorithms for
servo systems. IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 9(3):65-
72, 1989.
[ l l ] H.T. Nguyen, C.W. Tao, and W.E. Thompson. An empirical
study of robustness of fuzzy systems. In Proceeding of IEEE
Intl. Conf. on Fuzzy Systems, San Francisco, April 1993.
[12] R. Palm. Sliding mode fuzzy control. In Proceeding of IEEE
Intl. Conf. on Fuzzy System, San Diego, pages 519-526,
1992.
[13] L.A. Zadeh. Fuzzy sets. Inform. Contr., 8(3):338-353, June
1965.
[14] Z.Y. Zhao, M. Tomizuka, and S . Isaka. Fuzzy gain schedul-
ing of pid controllers. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and
'i., Cybern., SMC-23(5):1392-1398, September/October 1993.
 21c

MC

w i
19c

l g o c -

18C
I
I

17C

16C

175
I .
150 -

l7O; 200 400 600 600 Id00 12b0 Id00 1 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1 IO
Channel 1 Channel 4

Figure 5: The response of the first section. Figure 8: The response of the fourth section.

200
I
w - 1 I

170

165

160L
0 200 400 600 800
Channel 2
1000 1200
4
1400 1600
:L -
189
1360 1380
,
1400
,
1420
,
1440 1460
Channel 1
, ,
1480
,
1500
,
1520
,
1540
1
Figure 6: The response of the second section Figure 9: The steady state response of the first section

215r

200.6 I

200.4

200.2

200

199.8

169.61

M O 400 600 800

Channel 3
' L
1000 1200 1400 1600
169.2

1wL-
t 1360 1380
'
1400 1420 1440 1460
Channel 2
1480 1500 1520 1540

Figure 7: The response of the third section. Figure 10: The steady state response of the second section

- 373 -

Authorized licensed use limited to: ANNA UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on June 12, 2009 at 06:09 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 20 1

2
210.8 200 8

199.4 i
199.2

209' '
1360 1380 1400 1420 1440 1460 1480 1500 1520 1540
Channel 3

Figure 11: The steady state response of the third section

211 I
201 1 I

-'i
210.8

200.6

199.2

1360 1380 14bo 1i20 140 1460

Channel 4
1480 l&O 1&0 15h0 209 '
Figure 12: The steady state response of the fourth section.

a01

190.8 - J 200 8 I

189'
I 1I 199.2c I

- - 374

Authorized licensed use limited to: ANNA UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on June 12, 2009 at 06:09 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 195 -

1 9 0 -

Figure 17: The response curve of the fourth sectim with external
disturbance and changes of the temperature setting.

191.5

19 1

190.5

1 so

189.5

1 8 9

1 88.5

1 8 6

1 0 0 300
-
"'
400 500 600

(a) The first section.

201

200.5

200

199.5

199

198.6

I
300 400 500 600 700

(b) The 'second section.

212

2 10

208 -

206 -

204 -
202 -

200 -
19%
100 200 300
-.
400
. 500 600 '0

(c) The third section

Figure 18: The response curves of the first three sections of the barrel
when the temperature setting of the third section is3 changed.

- - 375

Authorized licensed use limited to: ANNA UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on June 12, 2009 at 06:09 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.