Design and Implementation of the FOIMC Using the PSO Algorithm for the Coupled Tank System

Abstract

In this work, a fractional order internal model controller (FOIMC) is developed for the level control of a coupled tank system. The parameters of the FOIMC are optimized by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The controller parameters obtained by the PSO algorithm, are compared with the gray wolf optimizer (GWO) and the whale optimization algorithms (WOA), and the PSO algorithm gave better results. The performance of the proposed FOIMC is compared with the state of the art. The experimental results obtained from the laboratory setup of the cylindrical tank system using the proposed FOIMC are also presented. The step responses from the simulation and the experimental results, indicated that the proposed FOIMC has good time domain performance than the state of the art. The proposed controller showed better robustness to a change in the operating point. The novelty of the present work is, for the first time, a comparative study of latest swarm algorithms is done for the tuning of FOIMC parameters.