International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems 2008

Oct. 14-17, 2008 in COEX, Seoul, Korea

Improving Performance of PID Controller Using Artificial Neural
Network for Disturbance Rejection of High Pressure Steam
Temperature Control in Industrial Boiler
Yul Yunazwin Nazaruddin, Abdullah Nur Aziz*, and Oktaf Priatna
Instrumentation and Control Research Group, Department of Engineering Physics,
Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung 40132, Indonesia
(Tel. +62-22-2504424; e-mail: yul@tf.itb.ac.id, aziz333@students.tf.itb.ac.id)

Abstract: The temperature of high-pressure steam is very important to be controlled in order to perform other
processes safely, especially for boiler-turbine system. Typically, PID regulator with fixed parameter is used for that
purpose. However this method may usually deteriorate the control performance, particularly if the systems exhibit
highly coupled behaviour. This paper will present the integration of intelligent control technique, especially artificial
neural network, to challenge some deficiencies of PID regulator in dealing with such problem. The proposed control
algorithm consists of a neural network controller, which is implemented parallel to the PID controller. The presented
neural network controller involves HP steam temperature and its set-point as input and error control signal as a learning
signal to be minimized. The ability of proposed algorithm is tested through step-like load disturbance into boiler plant
model. Remarkable results have been obtained during this disturbance test. These results showed better performance
to reject the disturbances compare with the controller which involves PID regulator alone.

Keywords: temperature of high-pressure steam, control performance, intelligent control technique, neural network
controller, PID controller.

1. INTRODUCTION model and in advanced to improve the performance of

PID controller. An elaboration of simulation study and
As a highly coupled system, the disturbances in any its results will be conducted at section 4. Section 5
part of the plant will have significant effect on high bring to a close of this paper by some conclusions.
pressure (HP) steam control system. These are mainly
caused by sudden changes in the HP steam flow and
heat release in combustion system due to imbalances
2. HIGH PRESSURE STEAM
during demand and supply of plant-wide systems. TEMPERATURE CONTROL
Such disturbances should be overcome and otherwise it In Cilacap oil refinery plant, the HP steam product is
causes permanently damage to the turbine blades. mainly used by turbine. The rest are taken by other
For such highly coupled systems, even a fine tuned refinery process. The qualities of HP steam which have
PID controller will experience a poor performance to be controlled are pressure and temperature. These
control action. On the other hand, it is reported that the duties are assigned to combustion control and
integration of intelligent methodology can improve the desuperheater feedwater flow control respectively. For
performance of PID controller [1-4]. For example in the second term, the existing control utilizes SISO
the utilization of neuro-fuzzy method for tuning of conventional control, with HP steam temperature as
control loop [2], for on-line control of mini-plant process variable and desuperheater feedwater flow as
process [3], for adaptive and intelligent control based on controlled variable. However, actually this is a coupled
neural network [4], and particularly in HP steam system and as an approach, the problem is treated as
temperature control, a comparative study of different MISO model.
type feedback control methods for superheater
temperature control can be found in [5]. Another
research has reported a strategy of incorporation a
two-level control structure consisting of higher-level
nonlinear model predictive control and lower-level PI
loops [6].
The contribution of this paper is in combining neural
network methodology and PID controller, including the
implementation of nonlinear model, for high pressure
steam temperature control. The rests of the paper will
be outlined as follows. Section 2 contains brief
explanation of high pressure steam temperature control
problem. Section 3 overviews proposed control
algorithm using neural network as nonlinear plant Fig. 1 Block diagram of HP steam temperature control
* on leave from Faculty of Science and Technology,
Universitas Jenderal Soedirman
Purwokerto, Indonesia

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 Fig. 1 shows a simplified diagram of HP steam
temperature control system as part of steam generation
process.
Assuming a fixed air-fuel ration, the control problem
is therefore to maintain high pressure steam temperature
by manipulating desuperheater feedwater flow whilst
minimizing disturbance caused by fuels and combustion
flow and fluctuating steam demand.
3. SIMULATION AND CONTROL
STRATEGY
3.1 Boiler desuperheater plant simulation
The plant is simulated using LabVIEW software
package consisting two nonlinear autoregressive
moving average (NARMA) models with time delay for
a class of MISO discrete time system, namely
temperature model and load model as follows
( ( ) )
y (k ) = f y ( k − 1) ,", y k − n y , u ( k − d ) ,"u ( k − nu ) ,
where k is sampling time, y and u are vectors output and
input, respectively, ny and nu are output and input delay,
in that order, and d is time delay of systems. The models
adopt two layers perceptron as universal function
approximation. The networks utilize sigmoid
activation function in each layer and backpropagation as
learning algorithm like discussed elsewhere in [1].
The networks apply input vectors as described below
⎣ (
x(k ) = ⎡uT ( k − d )"uT ( k − nu ) yT ( k − 1)"yT k − ny 1⎤ .
One minute sampling time and one minute time delay
(d=1) will be used by these models. Furthermore, the
models take ny = 3 and nu = 3. Temperature model
involves one output vector (steam temperature) and 16
input vectors. While load model employs one output
vector (fuels flow) and 7 input vectors. These input
vectors including the flows of fuel oil, fuel gas,
combustion air, and steam product as disturbance
variables; and desuperheater feedwater flow as
controlled variable.
3.2 Control strategy
A block-diagram representation of the control
strategy is shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Neural Network and PI control strategy
HP steam temperature is controlled by regulating
desuperheater feedwater flow through a control valve.
This control valve receives total input signal from PID
controller and neural network controller (NNC).
A conventional PID control algorithm is applied as
the basis controller to ensuring the stability of the
system at the beginning of learning and the NNC
algorithm is designed to improve its performance
through its ability to learn and adapt the variations of
operational conditions. During learning period, the
output from conventional PID control decreases slowly
and NNC becomes to dominate the overall control
system.
Generally speaking, the proposed controller employs
the difference between set-point and controlled variable
as performance criterion to be minimized with respect to
NNC’s weight. The learning process is based on back
propagation algorithm.
(1)
3.3 The controller algorithm
The formulation of the control strategy in its block
diagram form can be seen in Fig. 1. It consists of NNC
and PID controller where their control signals are added
as the control input to the boiler desuperheater plant as
shown in Eq. (3) below
UT ( k ) = U P ( k ) + U nn ( k ) , (3)
where UT, UP and Unn represent for total control input,
T control input from PID, and control input from NNC,
)
⎦
(2) respectively. If the error is defined as e ( k ) = r ( k ) − y ( k )
then UP is computed using the following expression
K PT
U P ( k ) = K P e ( k ) + U P ( k − 1) + e( k ) (4)
Ti k=1,2,..,
e ( k ) − e ( k − 1)
+K PTd
T
Kp, Ti, Td, T stand for proportional, integral, derivative
constant, and time sampling, correspondingly.
The control input from NNC is calculated
by U nn ( k ) = GN ( y N ( k ) − 0.5) , in which GN and yN
symbolize the gain and output from NNC, in that order.
The NNC will be trained on-line by using the input
T
vectors x ( k ) = ⎡⎣r ( k ) , y plant ( k ) ⎤⎦ . This type of network
has two layers with nh hidden units, one output variable,
and uses sigmoid activation function in each layer.
The input-output relationship can be calculated using
the equation below
⎛ nh ⎛2 ⎞⎞
yN ( k ) = F ⎜ ∑ Wh ( k ) F ⎜ ∑ Whi ( k ) xi ( k ) ⎟ ⎟ . (5)
⎝ h=1 ⎝ i =1 ⎠⎠
Whi ( k ) and Wh ( k ) represent the weighting matrices
between input and hidden layer and between hidden and
output layer, respectively.
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 In order to provide input control signal, Unn, that will refinery plant either. For comparison purposes, the
improve the performance of PID controller, different observation is also made if the control scheme applies
error criterion is defined which is denoted as follows PID controller only with similar operating condition.
Observation results will be discussed in the following
1 subsections.
( )
2
E(k) = r ( k ) − y plant ( k ) . (6)
2
4.1 Temperature set-point adjustment
where r(k) and yplant(k) refer to set-point and HP steam Sometimes it is necessary to adjust HP steam
temperature, respectively. Further, for updating the temperature into appropriate level regarding process
weights the gradient descent method is performed using operation demand. The following results are obtained
the relation using the NNC with the following parameters: nh = 2,
GN = 0.2, and a = 0.05. At the same time, the PID
∂E ( k ) (7) controller uses Kp = 1 and 3, Ti = 2 and 4, and Td = 0.2.
W ( k + 1) = W ( k ) − a
∂W ( k ) Figs. 3 and 4 shows the response of the control scheme
under set-point changes. It is obvious from those
where a > 0 is the learning rate and ∂E ( k ) ∂W ( k ) can figures that the control scheme using NNC + PID
controllers performs better in controlling the
be calculated using the following expressions multivariable system compared with PID controller
alone under the same set-point changes. These result
∂E ( k ) (8) relatively similar for two kinds of PID’s parameters.
∂Wh ( k )
( ) (
= δ p ( k ) F ' Soh ( k ) F Shi ( k ) ,)
∂E ( k )
= δih ( k ) xi ( k ) , (9) 463 Setpoint
∂Whi ( k )
HP Steam Temperature (C)

461
with
459
2
Shi ( k ) = ∑ Whi ( k ) xi ( k ),
i =1 457
nh
(
Soh ( k ) = ∑ Wh ( k ) F Shi ( k ) , ) 455
i =1
δih ( k ) = δ ho ( k )Wh ( k ) F ' ( Shi ( k ) ) , 0 200 400 600 800
Time (minute)
δ ho ( k ) = δ p ( k ) F ' ( Soh ( k ) ) ,
Fig. 3 The result of HP steam temperature under
( )
δ p ( k ) = − r ( k ) − y plant ( k ) y ' plant ( yN ( k ) ) , and step-like set-point adjustment (Kp = 1, Ti = 2, and Td =
0.2)
( )
y ' plant y N ( k ) = constant.

This type of controller will be performed in the

HP Steam Temperature (C)

following sequel. 461

1. Set r(k), x(k), Kp, Ti, Td, a, nh, Whi(k), Wh(k), GN. 459

2. Compute Unn, Up, and UT.

3. Output the control signal UT to the process. 457

4. Measure yplant.
5. Compute the difference r and yplant. 455
0 100 200 300 400 500
6. Update Whi(k) and Wh(k).
Time (minute)
7. Repeat 2 ~ 6
Fig. 4 The result of HP steam temperature under
step-like set-point adjustment (Kp = 3, Ti = 4, and Td =
4. RESULTS AND EVALUATION 0.2)
This section will show the results of the simulation
study conducted using the proposed technique. The 4.2 Disturbance rejection
objectives are to test the ability of the proposed In order to examine the effects of load disturbance on
algorithm to follow set-point adjustment and to reject the performance of the proposed controller, the flow
the effect of disturbance applied into nonlinear boiler steam is perturbed with amplitude of 3.5 ton/hours. The
model. In addition, the examination of the controllers simulation is conducted using similar parameters as
performance is done using a series of real-time data before in subsection 4.1. Figs. 5 and 6 demonstrate the
taken from a running boiler system at Cilacap oil result for such test.

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 459
HP Steam Temperature (C)
458
457
456
455
0 50
Time (minute)
Fig. 5 The result showing the capability of the
proposed control scheme under load disturbance (Kp = 1,
Ti = 2, and Td = 0.2)
458
HP Steam Temperature (C)
457
456
0 50
Time (minute)
Fig. 6 The result showing the capability of the proposed
control scheme under load disturbance (Kp = 3, Ti = 4,
and Td = 0.2)
Observing above figures, it can be shown that
remarkable results have been obtained. Again, these
results showed that better performance of the proposed
control scheme to reject the disturbances are achieved
compared to the scheme with the PID controller only.
4.3 Real data application
The examination is also conducted with real data
taken from the running boiler at Cilacap oil refinery
plant. For this purpose, parameters and structure of PID
similar to existing condition are used. The observation
is performed with parameters by, Kp = 0.3, Ti = 0.5, and
Td = 0.2. As can be seen from Fig. 7, neither PID
controller alone nor NNC and PID controller cannot
achieve set-point.
Fig. 7 Behavior of HP steam temperature dynamics
using the proposed control scheme compared with the
conventional one
This is probably caused by the inefficiency of heat
transfer mechanism inside the boiler. However, from the
figure, it can be concluded that the proposed control
scheme exhibit smooth actions in contrast to the
conventional one.
Observing the results, it can be seen that the NNC
and PID controllers demonstrate its ability to improve
performance of conventional PID controller
100 150 200 250 5. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, the utilization of artificial neural
network methodology for improving performance of
conventional PID controller has been reported. The
controller consists of conventional PID controller set up
in parallel with neural network controller (NNC). The
improvement is caused by the ability of NNC to adapt
its weights on-line in order to minimize the differences
between the set-point and HP steam temperature, and
compute the control signal input in advance to speed
up both disturbance rejection and set-point following
task. It can be revealed from the results that the
performance of the proposed control scheme is superior
100 150 200
compared to conventional PID controller either using
generic parameter or existing parameters. Furthermore,
results using data taken from the running boiler has
confirmed the better capability of this type of control
scheme to maintain HP steam temperature under desired
set-point.
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Hansen, Neural Networks for Modelling and
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