Design, Simulation and Comparison of Controllers for Temperature Profile Tracking Control of a Heat Flow System

In this paper, the design, simulation and performance comparison of the three different controllers applied to the heat flow system (HFS) are presented. First, the dynamic model of the HFS was obtained and so as to test the temperature control, sliding mode controller (SMC), adaptive sliding mode controller (ASMC) and adaptive fractional order sliding mode controller (AFOSMC) are designed and applied. To analyse the performance of the designed controllers a simulation environment is developed via the Matlab/Simulink software. The results, obtained through a simulation environment are represented by tracking error, adaptation gain, response to sudden changes, maximum overshoot, rise time and settling time and they showed that the heat flow system follows the reference temperature profile trajectory with less errors, overshoot, rise time and settling time by using the AFOSMC than the other controllers. Also, the maximum errors, rise time and settling time occurred when the sliding mode controller is used.