Development of PID-based furnace temperature control system for zirconium calcination

Abstract

The calcinator furnace in PSTA-BATAN is currently installed with ON-OFF temperature controller to maintaning temperature changes in calcination process. Calcination is a process of heating a substance at high temperature in stages but still below its melting point to remove its impurities. The ON-OFF temperature controller using a relay as the power switching for AC voltages applied on furnace electric heat element when the temperature exceeds or below the set point temperature. The contactor movement in relay will cause a sudden surge of voltages and currents which could lead to the thermal shock or unstable heating rates and unstable holding time. In this paper, the ON-OFF method was developed into Proportional Integral Derivative (PID)-based which has simple structure and robust performance for phase angle controlling in AC voltages applied on furnace electric heat element to controlling the temperature in multi stages by using Arduino Nano as the microcontroller.