Industrial sodium chlorate production is a highly energy-intensive
electro-chemical process. If the pH of the chlorate cell is not controlled,
the current efficiency drops from 99% to as low as 66.66%. Hence control of
chlorate cell pH is very significant for energy-efficient sodium chlorate
production. This study puts forward a fractional order PID controller for
controlling the pH of the sodium chlorate cell. The tuning of FOPID
controller variables is affected by employing particle swarm optimization.
The highlight of the controller is that it is flexible, easy to deploy and
the time of computation is significantly low as few parameters are needed to
be adjusted in PSO. The performance analysis of the suggested FOPID-PSO
controller was studied and compared with the traditional PI controller and
PID controller using time-domain provisions like settling time, rise time
and peak overshoot and error indicators like integral square error (ISE),
integral absolute error (IAE), and integral time absolute error (ITAE).
FOPID controller employing PSO proved to perform well compared to
conventional controllers with 0.5 sec settling time and 0.1 sec rise time.
This demonstrates that the FOPID-PSO controller has better setpoint
tracking, which is very essential for the process under consideration.