DEVELOPMENT OF A COMPUTER-BASED DATA ACQUISITION AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF FUZZY-PID HYBRID TEMPERATURE CONTROL FOR TORREFACTION

Abstract

Malaysia produces on average 30,000 tonnes municipal solid waste (MSW) daily to these saturated disposal landfill. Therefore, Malaysia has initiated a Waste-to-Energy (WtE) treatment system project to be implemented near to sanitary landfills. But, pre treatment of the MSW plays an important role before incineration. Unfortunately, MSW in its natural state is not an efficient method approach hence, processing treatments which enhance the properties such as moisture content (MC) and higher heating value (HHV) of the MSW are rising to attention. One of the processing treatment is known as torrefaction process which is a thermal decomposition process of MSW at a temperature between 130 °C to 300 °C. The main objective of this study is to compare and study the performance of hybrid fuzzy-PWM and PID controller on regulating the temperature level on the torrefaction process during the thermal decomposition. Each controller has its own downside effects in output response such as long rise time, high overshoot percentage and long settling time. This research aims to study the effect of PID and Fuzzy-PWM hybrid controller for temperature control during the torrefaction process. The PID controller is manually tuned resulting in 7 different forms of tuning parameters. The most suitable PID tuning is chosen based on shortest rise time, lowest percentage overshoot and lowest peak temperature. As for fuzzy controller, there are 5 different forms of rule bases established for fuzzy controller. The most suitable fuzzy controller is chosen based on shortest settling time, lowest overshoot percentage and lowest peak temperature. The best PID and fuzzy controllers are used to develop the hybrid controller. As a conclusion, the hybrid controller has the ability to perform temperature control at 130 °C and 150 °C by exhibiting shorter rise time by 30%, shorter settling time by 14% and lower overshoot percentage by 94% as compared to conventional PID or fuzzy controllers in the industry.