Cascade IMC Controller Design for Heating Furnace Temperature Control

This paper represents the designing and performance evaluation of Modified Ziegler-Nichols Tuning Method and Internal Model Control method for a heat furnace temperature control process. The various results shown in this paper shows how that IMC is a better technique of tuning than conventional tuning methods. Simulation results for the process show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. From the time domain specifications it has been proved that IMC based system produce less overshoot and reduce the settling time. The entire work has been done in MATLAB/Simulink. The simulation results indicate that IMC method is ideal for dynamic process and comparison between Modified Ziegler-Nichols Tuning method and IMC method shows that IMC tuning algorithm is best suited for setting up values of cascade controller gains, to be used for controlling nonlinear processes such as temperature.