From the initial open-loop (manual output step-change) test, we could see this process contains multiple lags in addition to about 2 minutes of dead time. Both of these factors tend to limit the amount of gain we can use in the controller before the process oscillates. Both Ziegler-Nichols tuning attempts confirmed this fact, which led me to try much lower gain values in my initial heuristic tests.

Given the self-regulating nature of the process, I knew the controller needed integral action, but once again the aggressiveness of this action would be necessarily limited by the lag and dead times. Derivative action, however, would prove to be useful in its ability to help “cancel” lags, so I suspected my tuning would consist of relatively tame proportional and integral values, with a relatively aggressive derivative value.

After some experimenting, the values I arrived at were 1.5 (gain), 10 minutes (integral), and 5 minutes (derivative). These tuning values represent a proportional action only one-third as aggressive as the least-aggressive Ziegler-Nichols recommendation, an integral action less than half as aggressive as the Ziegler-Nichols recommendations, and a derivative action five times more aggressive than the most aggressive Ziegler-Nichols recommendation. The results of these tuning values in automatic mode are shown here:

With this PID tuning, the process responded with much less overshoot of setpoint than with the results of either Ziegler-Nichols technique.

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