Integral Windup Resetting Enhancement for Sliding Mode Control of Chemical Processes with Longtime Delay

The effects of the windup phenomenon impact the performance of integral controllers commonly found in industrial processes. In particular, windup issues are critical for controlling variable and longtime delayed systems, as they may not be timely corrected by the tracking error accumulation and saturation of the actuators. This work introduces two anti-windup control algorithms for a sliding mode control (SMC) framework to promptly reset the integral control action in the discontinuous mode without inhibiting the robustness of the overall control system against disturbances. The proposed algorithms are intended to anticipate and steer the tracking error toward the origin region of the sliding surface based on an anti-saturation logistic function and a robust compensation action fed by system output variations. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms when they are applied to two chemical processes, i.e., (i) a Variable Height Mixing Tank (VHMT) and (ii) Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR) with a variable longtime delay. The control performance of the proposed anti-windup approaches has been assessed under different reference and disturbance changes, exhibiting that the tracking control performance in the presence of disturbances is enhanced up to 24.35% in terms of the Integral Square Error (ISE) and up to 88.7% regarding the Integral Time Square Error (ITSE). Finally, the results of the proposed methodology demonstrated that the excess of cumulative energy by the actuator saturation could reduce the process resources and also extend the actuator’s lifetime span.