2012 IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2012)

Real Time PID Control for Hydro-diffusion Steam

Distillation Essential Oil Extraction System Using
Gradient Descent Tuning Method
Zakiah Mohd Yusoff#1, Zuraida Muhammad#2, Mohd Noor Nasriq Nordin#3, Mohd Hezri Fazalul Rahiman#4,
Mohd Nasir Taib#5
#Faculty of Electrical Engineering, UiTM Shah Alam,Selangor, Malaysia
1
zakiah_yusoff@yahoo.com
2
muhammmad_zuraida@yahoo.com
3
nasriq85@yahoo.com
4
hezrif@ieee.org
5
dr.nasir@ieee.org

Abstract—This paper present the implementation of real
time PID controller for hydro-diffusion steam distillation
essential oil extraction system based on comparison of
Gradient Descent (GD) and Ziegler Nichols (ZN) tuning
methods. The first order of Auto Regressive Exogenous
(ARX) model was used to describe the behavior of the
temperature system and will be use in the controller
design. A PID controller is expected to execute a robust
response towards parameters changes and better control of
steam temperature during distillation process. The system
had been evaluated based on rise time, % overshoot,
settling time and root mean square error (RMSE). The
temperature control was achieved by controlling the
voltage fed to the heater ranging from 0V to 5V via digital-
to-analogue converter (DAC). Robustness test of the PID
controller are based on: i) introduce disturbance and ii)
set-point tracking. From the result, the performance of PID
controller using GD tuning method reveals that this
controller can be adapt for the system because being
sensitive to parameters changes and robust as the response
can compensate the load disturbance and set point change.
Keywords— Gradient descent, Ziegler Nichols, ARX model,
hydro-diffusion, distillation process, set-point tracking.
I. INTRODUCTION
Essential oils (EO) can be defined as the volatile aromatic
compound by extraction process which can be found mostly
from plant’s flowers, bark, wood, leaves, root, seed or resin [1,
2] and it stored in the pockets of the botanical material which
can be extracted by either breaking, heating or stirring the
pockets in boiling water[3]. The usage of essential oil covers
in aromatherapy, food and beverages, perfume, antibacterial
activity, and spa practices [2, 4, 5]. Generally, an analytical
procedure for essentials oils can be categories into two steps:
extraction process (such as steam distillation, hydro-distillation,
simultaneous distillation-extraction and solvent extraction),
and analysis process gas chromatography (GC), gas
chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS) [1, 4-
6].
Steam distillation is the earliest and popular extraction
technique for most botanical materials[7] compared to others
techniques such as solvent extraction, expression and critical
fluid extraction[1, 6]. The proportion of essential oils extracted
by steam distillation is 93% compared to the remaining only
7% of essential oil extracted[1]. Steam distillation usually
applied on the fresh and dried material[8]. Based on the review
above, the author already developed new system that uses
steam which is hydro-diffusion steam distillation system.
There are several factors affect the extraction yield such as
temperature, pressure, distillation time, chemical composition
and particle size [9]. This paper concentrating on steam
temperature as a controlled variable since it is one of the
significant factors in the extraction process. Controlling and
maintaining the temperature at the desired is a bit challenging
tasks due to various factors such as slow dynamic response
and process have lag or time delay[10, 11]. In order to make
sure the quality of essential oil, a good temperature controller
is needed. The PID controller have been well developed for
industrial and process control today [11, 12, 13] due to
simplicity, ease of design, low cost and effectiveness for most
linear systems [12]. The application of PID controller in
hydro-diffusion steam distillation essential oil extraction
system is expected to execute a robust response towards
parameters changes and better control of steam temperature
during distillation process.
In later part of the paper is organized as follows: In section
2, hardware set up and system configuration is presented.
Section 3 describes the plant’s modeling and followed by PID
controller design in section 4. The results of experimental
evaluation of the proposed technique on the hydro-diffusion
steam distillation are presented in Section 5, which is followed
by the concluding remarks.

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 2012 IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2012)

II. METHODOLOGY The system consists of three phase 240 Vac immersion
i. Hydro-diffusion steam distillation essential oil type heater with a power rating of 1.5kW. The sensor is a
extraction system platinum sensing element, PT-100 3 wires type placed in the
Hydro-diffusion steam distillation essential oil extraction material tray. PT100 connected with the signal conditioning
system is visualized as in Figure 1 and installed at Distributed circuit varies in terms of resistance value of 100ohm at 0 oC.
Control System Laboratory (DCS) in University Teknologi The temperature control was achieved by controlling the
Mara, Malaysia. The distillation column with 10 litre water is voltage fed to the heater ranging from 0V to 5V via digital-to-
heated by immersion heater to produce steam. Pressurized analogue converter (DAC). Computer was used as a control
steam is supply from the top of the plant and passed through unit. PCI-1711 Advantech card was used to interface between
the botanical materials. Pressurized steam is used to vaporize hardware and control unit. Software for the system was
the volatile oils in the plant material. The steam and oil vapor developing using MATLAB programming to monitor the
mixture is then going down through the small tube to the signal response and for real-time implementation, MATLAB
condenser. The implementation of heating process in pilot Real Time Workshop (RTW) was employed.
plant of essential oil extraction system is described in Figure 1.
III. PLANT’S MODELING
Modeling approach basically starts with the design of
experiment to obtain input and output data, followed by model
structure selection, then model estimation and lastly is model
validation. The Auto Regressive Exogenous (ARX) model was
used to describe the behavior of the global model based on the
RTD relationship between input and output data. The system is
perturbed with Pseudo Random Binary Sequence (PRBS) as
an input and temperature as an output signal. The PRBS
amplitude is selected to adhere at maximum of 100% from the
full scale (5V) when PRBS signal is 1 and 50% of full scale
(2.5V) when the PRBS signal at 0. The output of steam
temperature response and PRBS input as in Figure 3.

Temperature vs time sample

95

90
T em p e ra tu re (oC )

85

Figure 1 The hydro-diffusion steam distillation essential oil extraction 80

system

ii. System Configuration 75

The system is divided into 3 main parts which is process PB=0.4

plant, data acquisition using PCI-1711 card and control unit as 70

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 5000

in Figure 2 below. Time sample (s)

(a)
PRBS input
1

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6
O n /O ff

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
Figure 2 Block diagram of system configuration Time(sec)

(b)
Figure 3 Input-output data of heating process, (a) output, (b) input.

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 2012 IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2012)
There are 5000 input-output data collected in this
experiment. The PRBS signal is generated with PB=0.4 and
clock period factor Nb=2.5 (Nb=1/PB). All data have been
sampled at Ts=1. The initial temperature at steam tray is 70.8
o
C and was gradually increased up to 94.1 oC.
i. ARX Modeling
The fundamental of ARX model structure is given by
equation (1) below [14]
(1)
where the polynomials A(q) and B(q) are given by
(2)
where q-1 is the delay operator and e(t) represent the white
noise.
The input-output data are divided equally into 2 sets: odd
number samples data (1, 3, 5...) are used for estimation, the
even number samples (2, 4, 6...) are used for validation
purposed by using interlacing technique. The modeling is done
by using model order 1. The obtained ARX model was
employed as in equation (3)
A(q) = 1 - q-1
(3)
B(q) = 0.0082 q-1
In represent the system, good model should be
representative in all condition of the system. The validation on
ARX model shows the performance criteria using fitness, R2 is
98.41%.The performance criteria based on RMSE and mean
square error (MSE) are 0.1037 and 0.0108 respectively. This
model accepted to perform further for controller design.
IV. PID CONTROLLER DESIGN
Figure 4 illustrates the block diagram of PID module for
controlling steam temperature for hydro-diffusion steam
distillation plant.
Figure 4 Block diagram of PID controller
290
The PID controller is give in equation (4) where Kp, Ki,
and Kd is the coefficients for proportional (P), integral (I) and
derivative (D) respectively whereas e (t) is the error.
(4)
There are three gain parameters consists in PID controller.
In this study, GD and ZN tuning methods were applied to tune
these parameters. The Ziegler-Nichols tuning method is well
known and often forms the basis for tuning procedures used by
control system vendors. In the ZN approach, simple formulas
for PID controller settings are expressed in terms of ultimate
gain Ku and ultimate period Tu of the process. The
disadvantages of experimentally determining the critical
parameters are that the system can be brought to a state of
instability [15, 16]. To overcome these problems, gradient
descent optimization is applied to tune these parameters and
was done by simulation. Gradient descent is one of the
optimization techniques to tune important parameter
simultaneously. The method improves dynamic and steady
state response and maintains the frequency at desired level [17,
18].Gradient descent tuning algorithm requires no knowledge
of the plant to be controlled. This makes the algorithm robust
to changes in the plant. It also makes the algorithm universally
applicable to linear and nonlinear plants, with or without noise,
with or without time delay. The algorithm achieves the tuning
objective by minimizing an error function [19].
The PID parameters are tabulated in Table 1 for GD and
Table II for ZN tuning method .The tuned parameters of PID
controller that was done by simulation is tested on the real
system.
TABLE 1
PID PARAMETERS USING GD
Parameter
Kp 17.22
Ki 0.0000288
Kd 0.0001583
TABLE II
PID PARAMETERS USING ZN
Parameter
Kp 26.8
Ki 0.0002057
Kd 16.575
V. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
i. Real Time Implementation
In this paper, PID controller is designed to control the steam
temperature at the desired temperature.
 2012 IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2012)

Step response performance Disturbance test

95
92

90 90

88
Steam temperature, degC

Steam temperature,degC
85 86

84

80
82

Without With
80
disturbance disturbance
75
GD 78
Setpoint
ZN 76
70
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Time sample, s Time sample,s

Figure 5 PID controllers step response Figure 6 PID controllers response with disturbance

TABLE IV
TABLE III
DISTUREBANCE TEST PERFORMANCE
STEP RESPONSE PERFORMANCE PID CONTROLLER GD ZN
o o
Rise %OS Settling RMSE Tmin 87.62 C 87.42 C
PID time time (s) Time taken to go back to 151 386
CONTROLLER (s) the setpoint, (s)
GD 345 0.6700 1993 0.4239
ZN 658 0.9800 2667 0.6707 From the result in Figure 6, after introduce the disturbance
at sample 1000s, steam temperature decrease with Tmin=
o o
Figure 5 and Table III shows the step response 87.62 C and Tmin= 87.42 C for GD and ZN controller
performance for real time PID controller using GD and ZN respectively. However, time taken to go back to the set point
tuning method. In term of the rise time, GD gave faster after introduce disturbance for GD controller is two times
response with 345 s compared with the ZN with 658 s. There faster which is only 151s compared with ZN controller = 386s.
is different approximately 0.31% deviation for overshoot Significant improvement can be spotted to GD controller
between GD=0.67% and ZN= 0.98%. For a settling time because provide fast and robust response in comprising an
criteria, GD reach the faster settling time with 1993 s abrupt disturbance during running process.
compared with ZN= 2667 s. Meanwhile, the roots mean The PID controller also assessed based on the set point
squared error (RMSE) showed that PID controller using GD tracking where the actual response is expected to follow the
tuning method outperformed PID controller using ZN with reference signal, r(k):
0.4239 and 0.6707 respectively.
Robustness test of the PID controller are based on: i) o
introduce disturbance and ii) set-point tracking. The objective 80 C; for 0 <k< 700
o
of the introduce disturbance is to test ability of the PID r(k) = 85 C; for 701 <k< 1200
o
controller in comprising an abrupt disturbance during running 90 C; for 1201 <k< 1700
process. The disturbance is cut off the power supply from
1.5kW to 0W for 30 seconds and start at 1000 samples.

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 2012 IEEE Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC 2012)
Setpoint change performance
92
90
88
86
S t e a m t e m p e ra t u re , d e g C
84
82
80
78
76
200 400 600 800
Time sample,s
1000 1200
Figure 7 PID controllers with set-point tracking
Figure 7 illustrates the comparison between GD and ZN
performance in controlling the system using step change input.
As can be seen, at higher temperature level, both controllers
performed well in tracking the stipulated set point. Regardless
of lower temperature, GD still showed a consistent and better
control performance compared to ZN.
VI. CONCLUSION
This work demonstrates the implementation of real time
PID controller using GD and ZN tuning method for hydro-
diffusion steam distillation essential oil extraction system. The
performance of PID controller using GD tuning method
reveals that this controller can be adapt for the system because
being sensitive to parameters changes and robust as the
response can compensate the load disturbance and set point
change .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was conducted on the data gathered at the
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, UiTM Shah Alam.The
authors would like to thank all staff involved and RMI UiTM
and JPbSM UiTM.
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