Adaptive PID Control Application for an Airflow Monitoring System

This paper discusses the application of adaptive control, using a set of self-tuning PID control laws and a recursive least squares parametric identification method with a variable forgetting factor. This adaptive controller has been developed and applied to a computer simulated airflow monitoring system to maintain a specific setpoint against various airflow rates. The computer simulations show that the adaptive control algorithm developed meets the above control objective, and the system performance is superior to that using a conventional fixed-parameter PID controller. The developed adaptive control technique can be applied for the temperature control of a process with varying plant's characteristics.