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This paper focuses on the development of intelligent controllers for use in a process of enzyme recovery from pineapple rind. The proteolytic enzyme bromelain (EC 3.4.22.4) is precipitated with alcohol at low temperature in a fed-batch jacketed tank. Temperature control is crucial to avoid irreversible protein denaturation. Fuzzy or neural controllers offer a way of implementing solutions that cover dynamic and nonlinear processes. The design methodology and a comparative study on the performance of fuzzy-PI, neurofuzzy, and neural network intelligent controllers are presented. To tune the fuzzy PI Mamdani controller, various universes of discourse, rule bases, and membership function support sets were tested. A neurofuzzy inference system (ANFIS), based on Takagi-Sugeno rules, and a model predictive controller, based on neural modeling, were developed and tested as well. Using a Fieldbus network architecture, a coolant variable speed pump was driven by the controllers. The experimental results show the effectiveness of fuzzy controllers in comparison to the neural predictive control. The fuzzy PI controller exhibited a reduced error parameter (ITAE), lower power consumption, and better recovery of enzyme activity.

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The control design of coupled tanks is not an easy task due to the nonlinear characteristic of the valves, and the interactions between the controlled variables. Those features pose a challenge in the automatic control, so that linear controllers, such as conventional PID, might not work properly for regulating this MIMO system. Some advanced control techniques (e. g. control based on neural networks) can be used since neural networks are universal approximators which can deal with nonlinearities and interactions between process variables. In the present work, an experimental investigation was performed presenting a comparison between two neural network-based techniques and testing the feasibility of these techniques in the coupled tanks system. First principles simulations helped to find suitable parameters for the controllers. The results showed that the model predictive control based on artificial neural networks presented the best performance for supervisory tests. On the other hand, the inverse neural network needed a very accurate model and small plant-model mismatches led to undesirable offsets.

The pH neutralization process is typical in chemical, biological and petrochemical industries. One of the major challenges to control it is to understand its nonlinearities and that requires several fine adjustments from conventional controls. Artificial Intelligence has been used to study these nonlinearities; one of them is Neuro-Fuzzy Logic, which was investigated in this work to develop controls dedicated to this process. These controls are formed by logical structures and may be adjusted to different configurations. In practical applications, it is highly important to adapt control parameters based on artificial intelligence to obtain better performance. The present work studied the effect of different configurations of a neuro-fuzzy control on the performance of a regulatory control to pH neutralization process by means of a virtual plant developed in both Indusoft© and Matlab© environments. For both variables, pH and reactor level control, membership function (MF) = [Gaussian], method “OR” = [probabilistic], method “E” = [product], type of MF output = [linear] and the optimization method = [hybrid], have improved control performance, which confirms the importance of configuration choices in neuro-fuzzy control adjustments. Moreover, the most determining factor in NFC performance is the types of membership functions.