Temperature Control of Heating Zone for Drying Process: Effect of Air Velocity Change

Abstract

This paper proposes a temperature control technique to adjust air temperature in a heating zone for drying process. The controller design is achieved by using an internal model control (IMC) approach. When the IMC controller parameters were designed by calculating from an actual process transfer function estimated through an open-loop step response with input step change from 50% to 60% at a reference condition at air velocity of 1.20 m/s, the performance of temperature controller was experimentally tested by varying an air velocity between 1.32 m/s and 1.57 m/s, respectively. The experimental results showed that IMC controller had a high competency for controlling the drying temperature.