An optimal model-based PID tuning method for the control of poly-butadiene latex reactor

The PBL (Poly-butadiene Latex) production process is a typical batch process. Changes of the reactor characteristics due to the accumulated scaling with the increase of batch cycles require adaptive tuning of the PID controller being used. In this work we propose a tuning method for PID controllers based on the closed-loop identification and the genetic algorithm (GA) and apply it to control the PBL process. An approximated process transfer function for the PBL reactor is obtained from the closed-loop data using a suitable closed-loop identification method. Tuning is performed by GA optimization in which the objective function is given by ITAE for the setpoint change. The proposed tuning method showed good control performance in actual operations.