A novel intelligent controller for combating stiction in pneumatic control valves

Pneumatic control valve introduces limit cycles in process variables due to stiction nonlinearity. In this paper a novel stiction combating intelligent controller (SCIC) based on fuzzy logic has been proposed. The proposed technique reduces the complexity of the overall control scheme as it does not require any additional compensator. The SCIC controller is a variable gain fuzzy Proportional Integral (PI) controller making use of Takagi-Sugeno (TS) scheme. The performance of the SCIC controller has been investigated and compared with conventional PI controller on a laboratory scale flow process. SCIC controller outperformed PI controller and provided promising performance with lesser aggressive stem movement.