Feedback-feedforward fuzzy logic approach for temperature control in bioethanol vacuum distiller

Abstract

Energy conservation and diversification are becoming a major research issue. Awareness of the limited sources of energy from fossil fuels encourages research on renewable energy. Bioethanol is a promising fuel substitute for gasoline. Bioethanol processing includes sugar extraction, fermentation, distillation, and absorption. Temperature and pressure controls are essential in bioethanol processing. This paper presents a feedback-feedforward fuzzy logic approach for temperature control in a bioethanol vacuum distiller. In this study, vacuum pressure is employed as feedforward inputs for a fuzzy logic controller. The feedforward input directly modifies the main controller, i.e., fuzzy logic controller, through fuzzy rules. The controller is implemented using Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller. The results show that the proposed feedback-feedforward fuzzy logic controller could successfully maintain the temperature at the desired setpoint value with small steady-state error (3.85%) and relatively shorter settling time compared to classical PID controller and fuzzy logic controller.